So looking at your summary, he doesn't seem to understand what economic growth is, which lines up with him liking Sam Altman's blog post. His talk about 'actual' GDP being the nominal and not the real GDP is similarly stupid. Any more on this topic should probably be in a new thread (ping me if you make one), but I'll finish my thoughts on it here:He then talks about what economic growth actually is. He examines the assumption that people spending more is good for the economy. "Why do we think this?", he asks. His answer is that we're assuming that money spent = desires being met and maximizing pleasure is good. He then explodes the logic of this worldview before substituting his own: rather than focusing on meeting people's desires, we should focus on the state ruling the people effectively. All citizens are assets of the government - in other words, they are the slaves of the government. The government is just a money-making corporation and wants to make its slaves a better asset. This, he claims, is reality.
The fact that he thinks 1953 is better than 2013, factoring out technology, is an actual example of privilege. For a straight, white, male, (can't believe I'm saying that unironically) 1953 is great. Now those don't matter. To examine this, we should use Kant's Veil of Ignorance, so he doesn't know what his race, sex, or sexuality will be in either society. There is a chance he ends up black in the Jim Crow South, a gay man being arrested for dancing, or a woman who has no real choice but to be a housewife (the problem there is the lack of choice, not the housewife part). Suddenly, 1953 doesn't look so great compared to 2013.From there, Moldbug talks about whether 1953 or 2013 would be a more preferable society and comes to the conclusion that, minus the technological advancement we have now, 1953 was noticeably better. Our civilization has declined, he says, because there are less places Sam Altman would feel safe walking around with his iPad in. This is another point that Moldbug reiterates time and again in his essays: that technological progress is a mask for social decay. Civilization produces technology, so technological progress is a lagging indicator of a declining civilization. The civilization will start declining before technological progress does.
For state positions they have. In MA (my state), they ran Dan Fishman for auditor, given that both the dem and the republican were corrupt. We even got the Boston Globe's endorsement. Then we did worse than the Greens, because the campaign was anemic. Larry Brown is a similar story.Another thing which I think contributes to Libertarian losses in elections is that they've never managed to put forward a decent candidate; I cannot think of a single one which stuck in my mind for more than a few minutes, and I was desperate to find alternatives to voting for either a Democrat or a Republican for decades.
The LP is an absolute joke. I want it to die so another one can be made, but it won't.