Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history. *Billions* of people can afford food and shelter and clothing now, who would otherwise have died. We have eradicated diseases which have plagued humanity and caused incalculable harm. People are surviving all manner of afflictions like cancer and heart disease. We have harnessed flight, and billions of people can now afford to travel to the other side of the world to begin a new life, or just experience another culture. The internet has enabled the poorest people in the most remote regions of the world to learn advanced knowledge, start businesses, and improve their lives and the lives of their communities.
Anyone who lives in a first world nations lives an infinitely better life than even kings did just a century or two ago. I think it is easy to see the negatives that living in our world entails, but in truth, there are so many positives, and I think it behoves us to remember that.
> Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history
As economist, this entire sentence repulses me. No, it wasn't thanks to frantic capitalism. None of the "mechanism" that are adjudicated to frantic capitalism alone mean everything to bring most people out of poverty. What actually has brought more people out of poverty was consistent growth paired with a fairer distribution of the gains in productivity... which is not an economic system feature
Well, not only I have a title, you can't respond with anything of substance because my comment gave you no chance to respond with anything other than your opinion. That's how you shut down keyboard warriors such as yourself.
I do. My parents do. My wife does. Most of my friends do. Her parents do. Most of my colleagues do.
To be clear, I am not claiming that everyone is universally better off today than 20 years ago. Obviously that would be silly. I’m making the case that modern society affords many benefits in aggregate.
This is a tautology. Technological advancement doesn’t just appear. It’s the product of an interconnected social and economic system which encourages risk-taking. I can speak to my industry: pharmaceuticals. New drugs are developed because brave people are willing to risk billions of dollars. Most drugs fail. If they were smart they’d retire to a beach somewhere, but thankfully they want even more money, and they invest unbelievable piles of money into moon shots in the hope that one day they cure cancer and make a fortune.
Contrary to what Reddit might tell you, the majority of new drugs are developed by private industry, not universities. These include life changing drugs like propranolol, fluoxetine, sildenafil, atorvastatin, semaglutide, and many more.
Elon Musk didn’t build globally distributed internet for a laugh. He hasn’t reduced the cost of space logistics by 90% for fun. He did it because he wanted more money. He was incentivised to risk his entire fortune on more than one occasion.
Thanks to. Humanity has attempted 37 separate experiments with communism in the last century alone, and they resulted in 100M+ deaths. To be clear, no one is claiming that capitalism is perfect. Merely that it is the best of all the options on the table. The problem with communism is that it doesn't account for the human element. Most notably greed, corruption, and nepotism. The reason capitalism succeeds where communism fails is that it embraces the ugly underside of humanity and harnesses it for good. Elon Musk would never have revolutionised internet payments, EVs, space-based internet distribution, and reduced space transport costs by 90% if there were no reward for him. Humanity benefits thanks to his greed.
Yes but we can't run a simulation of what life would have been like if, say, we'd had monarchies or socialism instead, and technology kept advancing. We can only state what has transpired. If there was no Elon Musk, would someone else have had the vision to build out the super charger network and the gigafactory to have forced electric vehicles into being viable? If the Wright brothers hadn't been the first to fly, would someone else have managed to do the same thing? The first transatlantic telegraph cable failed.
I'm no expert on Georgism but I think there are reasonable answers to your questions.
1. "Coffee shop draws more commence drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents faster than even the spectre of “gentrification”"
This is an impossible premise. The relationship between the cost of the LVT and the popularity are directly and inseparably linked. LVT only goes up (and stays higher) when the neighbourhood is popular. It drops (and stays lower) if the neighbourhood falls out of popularity. In real life it would reach an equilibrium, but it might encounter some volatility along the way.
This is overshadowed by many more factors than a small increase in taxes, and I would propose that an LVT is a minor factor in the popularity of neighbourhoods.
2. Similarly how do you think about new uses for land emerging? If I lease desert land for a data center because it’s so perfect for it, instead of buying it … how (and when) does it show up in LTV increases? What if I trade you some other benefit to keep it out of LVT impacting records?
The tricky part about LVT is that it requires an assessment of value prior to realisation. Popular methods include using a combination of average of realised land prices in the area, against a velocity coefficient (the general gain/loss over a period of time), modified by negatively and positively correlated correlates like proximity to public transport and parks. There are countless ways proposed to do just this so I won't retread worn ground.
In the case of the desert data centre, it is likely that the land will not increase much in value. This is by design, because we want data centres (and similar industry) to move into the middle of nowhere so that scarce land is instead used for more productive enterprise like housing for workers so they can get to work easily.
3. Are you just costing the world coordination surplus by forcing high value enterprises to distribute themselves (inefficiently) just far enough apart that they don’t drive up each other’s LVT? That’s a deadweight loss.
This is the brilliant part of Georgism, and the reason I "converted." A well designed LVT imputes the social costs (implied by their economic costs) of the use of land. It then gives the businesses the fully informed choice of how to deploy their capital. It could be that the efficiency you allude to is real, and is worth remaining on high value land. So be it. The business is the best actor to make that decision. On the other hand, if the deadweight loss is lower than the LVT, then the land should be better utilised by another company which would have better utility for its location.
Georgism aligns social costs with business interests in a way no other tax currently does. Meaning that businesses act in their best interests, and in doing so, act in the best interests of society.
On principle I usually vote against anyone who harms me, my life, or my family’s life. I’ve never accepted the claims that people who hold up traffic to “raise awareness” for global warming were effective. We’re all aware of the phenomenon now. You’re just being an asshole and throwing a tantrum because people aren’t voting like you want them to.
I'm not sure I understand what work "on principle" is doing in this sentence.
What's the difference between voting against anyone who acts against your interests "on principle", and voting against anyone who acts against your interests "out of self-interest"?
(I am not suggesting that you shouldn't vote self-interestedly; arguably democracy works best when everyone does.)
Assuming I understand your question, I vote for people I would not have otherwise voted for merely to spite the people who have harmed me in some way. It's petty but it makes me feel like I have reclaimed some agency against said aggressors.
Candidate A - will do X, Y, Z all in ways I think are the best
Candidate B - will do A, B, C which I prefer less than X, Y, Z but in the grand scheme likely impact my day to day life little.
Candidate A - also supports (or is supported by) people / movements that actively make my life harder and piss me off.
That's not cutting off my nose that's deciding I can live with a less optimal solution to some problems to avoid something that pisses me off massively from growing more powerful
>I’ve never accepted the claims that people who hold up traffic to “raise awareness” for global warming were effective
Martin Luther King wrote an essay about people with this exact attitude called "the racism of the polite liberal"
There were obviously just as many people back then who thought his type of activism - e.g. blocking a freeway would never achieve any of his goals. They thought it was just annoying, even though it was successful.
I find it fascinating when people make the argument that the reason the civil rights movement succeeded was the harm done to society, and not because it was morally right. The implications of this claim are frightening, and can be used to justify all manner of violence for any and all political causes. Should someone wish to restrict abortion rights, they just need to sufficiently terrorise the nation to the degree that they get their way? I strongly disagree that that is how laws and rights work in a democracy.
I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right. Not because black activists caused social harm.
What is morally right is a matter of public consensus, not a self-evident fact to those outside that moral context. Law is the expression of morality at a societal level. How do you propose changing the societal expression of the public consensus without making a nuisance of yourself?
The same way all progress is made in a democracy: dialogue. Violence and domination has been frequently used throughout history, but we no longer solve our differences that way. At least, I don’t want to live in such a society.
I don't think any significant social change has been bought about by people asking nicely. Votes for women, anti racism, worker's rights, land rights - all hard fought for.
I don’t think dialogue has ever been the principal motivator for social change.
> I don’t want to live in such a society.
You kind of already do, but kind of don’t. Coercive politics still rule, but countries with strong civil liberties protections allow less harmful forms of coercion. Under strongman rule, coercion looks like the threat of murder. Under a liberal democracy, coercion looks like blocking traffic. That’s a big improvement.
Positive incentives (bribery and upside) also play a role opposite coercion. But “dialogue” absent self interested or dominance-oriented goals is a much less significant influence—unless you loosen the definition of dialogue to include things like “I convince you that it’s in your interests to vote for X so that protestors stop blocking traffic”, at which point there’s no distinction between the concepts.
That's incredibly naïve. If being morally right was all it took, slavery would not have been a thing in the first place.
Do you think people just naturally become more aware of immoral things? Even if you assume better education is the single reason, that's something that's very much not a given, and is in fact constantly being attacked by people who benefit from it not being guaranteed.
When you're fighting against billionaires who want to act against your best interest, do you believe you just need to appeal to people's morality and it's an easy win? Sorry to say it doesn't work like that, though it'd be wonderful if it did. People's minds are swayed easier by financial interests than they are by moral value. That's the impact of a capitalist system allowing levels of inequality putting even people's livelihood in danger.
Status quo is much easier to defend than it is to disrupt, regardless of how immoral it is in the first place. And disruption needs drastic measures to be successful when fighting an asymmetrical war of resources.
> That's incredibly naïve. If being morally right was all it took, slavery would not have been a thing in the first place.
I think this is incredibly naive. Morality isn’t objective. It changes and adapts and grows. It is the product of culture and religion and circumstance. Values can deviate markedly between people in a single family, let alone within a nation and between nations.
Slavery used to be considered moral in the West. Then some time in 1833, the British people voted to end it across all colonies. Not because slaves terrorised British citizens into acquiescence, but because literature and education and culture had advanced, and the British no longer believed that people should be enslaved.
I’m sorry, I simply do not subscribe to your vision for society of might making right. That is the domain of dictators and despots, not democracies.
>I find it fascinating when people make the argument that the reason the civil rights movement succeeded was the harm done to society,
I find it fascinating that what Martin Luther King described as the "polite liberal racist" who moaned about blocking a freeway is still alive and well.
>I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right
No, it worked because of Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest tactics - the ones which you described as terrorism.
Your choice to depict blocking a freeway as "violence" doesnt make it so, it simply puts you in the camp of liberals he criticised for indirectly supporting the racist status quo.
Thats your right of course, although the parallels to MLK's essay about the backlash he faced for holding up traffic are still precisely applicable here no matter how upsetting you may find that.
Success of protests and grassroots movements does not scale with harm/annoyance to society. If that were true you'd just have to be as annoying and hostile as possible to win, which would have been sussed out a long time ago.
The predictor is public moral sentiment, and maximizing exposure to an issue people would be sympathetic to.
Blocking traffic "for climate awareness" does not engender sympathy. People think themselves "aware" that climate is an issue, but aren't on board with perverse degrowth solutions.
I can tolerate Teams being a bit mid because the core functionality nearly always works. I can tolerate Outlook being meh because it's doing a lot (nothing I, a lowly IC really need though I can imagine the top hatted boss who does) and I think it does okay with the scope it's tackling.
But the M365 copilot app is inexcusable for being as core to Microslop's strategy.
> Then why do the 7 publicly listed health insurers have shitty shareholder returns?
CNC is up 90% YoY. That's far more than any of the largest tech companies. Alphabet is the highest of the tech stocks, and it's up 38% in the same period. When we look at the performance of the seven large U.S. publicly traded health insurers, their returns were extraordinary in the decade following the ACA.
Listening to these leaders speak, this appears to be a major component. They're trying to pour trillions of investment into communities all over the world, and local communities are rejecting it. The reasons are complex and I'm not going to paint either side as the bad guy. However if they can't get approval to build more infrastructure on Earth, they going to build it in space. At least what is economical. SpaceX has already reduced the cost of space delivery by 90%. This has already made all kinds of new applications commercially viable. Every efficiency increase from now unlocks exponentially more use cases.
As a long time space and technology nerd, this is the coolest fucking time to be alive!
> Landlord costs affect supply in the long term, so you will see changes, just not necessarily immediately over a one year period, but definitely over a 5-10 year period.
This is true, but the degree depends on elasticity of supply, and that depends a lot on profitability of the sector.
I think that there's something about LVT, but your dismissal is very shallow and why it's not been implemented so far.
I don't _want_ $1M, I want to live in my house that I bought and lived in for years. Getting money I don't need and having to live in a place I don't want to live in is _not_ a positive situation.
I don't think some extra taxes on expensive land is the red line you appear to believe it is. People who own expensive land have many options the rest of the world could only dream of, including reverse mortgages. Meaning no one is actually forcing anyone off their land. They're just being asked to pay some extra taxes. If you believe tax is theft, I can see why this is agitating, but I do not share that view.
I do not share that "taxation is theft" view either. And I agree that owning expensive land is a privileged position. But the concern of being pushed out of one's home because of an increase in tax is real, "just sell it" is not a viable solution, houses and locations are not fungible.
Maybe reverse mortgages are the answer, I'm not sure, I'll admit I'm not very knowledgable about this.
Why do you believe that you should be allowed to preserve your present lifestyle in amber at a (very minor incremental) cost to economic prosperity for all of society?
If only this were true, we wouldn't have homeowners constantly fighting against new development or construction. Many homeowners treat their primary residence as an investment.
> If only this were true, we wouldn't have homeowners constantly fighting against new development or construction. Many homeowners treat their primary residence as an investment.
You'll be very hard pressed to find any home owner who actually thinks in this cartoonish way.
When people oppose changing the character of their home neighborhood it has nothing to do with "treating their primary residence as an investment". It is because they selected a place to live, to call home, based on some criteria that they liked. Everyone does. A home is a big commitment, so you spend a lot of time researching exactly where you want to settle down for the next many decades. You pick an area you like, a neighborhood you enjoy.
For some people that might be quite rural, for some people distant suburban, for others near-city suburban, for others inner-city center. Whichever type of area you select, it is because that's the kind of area you personally enjoy the most. Somehow this obvious truth is controversial on HN for reasons I don't understand, but it is the truth. People select what makes them happy, no surprise.
So, when people oppose seeing their suburban area torn down to build highrises, it has absolutely nothing to do with home values or investments.
People oppose it because they very intentionally chose to live in a suburb far away from highrises and now they see those imposed on them. Of course they're unhappy. Basic human nature, nothing to do with investments.
If someone feels this is not so, I'd appreciate an explanation of your viewpoint.
In my experience the vast majority of NIMBYs do not care about how much their property is worth. They just really don’t want the area they live in to change, because they think all change is bad.
I was pointing to the argument that "you didn't do anything to make it happen. Only right that excess value goes back to society and reduces the tax burden of the working class."
Sounds like Obama's "If you’ve got a business, you didn't build that" argument (though Obama might have just screwed up the words, or maybe he simply had a Kinsley gaffe, aka a Freudian Slip).
The land owner DID work for it. He BOUGHT that land (and also the option that it could go up, or down, in value) with the sweat of his hard earned work or savings, or that of their family or business partners.
OP's wording states that he would favor confiscating value generated by the acquisition if such value happened because the market's perceived value increased.
It's basically a communist wealth redistribution logic.
My point is that if someone were to offer $1M for OP's "bengarcia.dev" domain, that OP would not send $999,988 ($1M minus $12 bucks of registration) to the Federal Government.
Yes Ben, The US Government IS READY TO TAKE YOUR GIFT!
Are you making the argument that land banking is economically productive? Or a more esoteric point about the how people "earn" money? Because land banking is economically unproductive, and there isn't much dispute about that. I'm much less interested in a philosophical argument about whether you believe land banking is definitionally money earned or realised.
“land banking is economically unproductive, and there isn't much dispute about that”
I think you are confusing current utilization with economic productivity. There is an opportunity cost in hoding the land but land can also have economic value in the option. It’s the owner choice if he values its use even if it’s waiting for the option to come through and values it more than whatever alternative a self professed smart politician or OP’s abstract “society” might propose.
Whats’s next? Taxing you for your unused bedrooms, unused cars, unused clothes in your closet, unused nose rings, etc etc?
Just because some policymaker can identify a more productive use for someone’s property does not mean the policymaker knows the owner’s opportunity cost or future options or even risk better than the land owner.
An even better argument might be why do we need to tax at all? It’s not that governments are the pinnacle of capital allocation efficiency. After some useful level, governments are basically corruption machines ESPECIALLY IN CALIFORNIA. Just look at their homeless and illegals industrial complex.
I disagree. A major premise of Georgism is efficient use of high demand land. E.g. housing close to high wage workplaces in cities. If we make exemptions for people to sit on land forever - who do not need or want to work in those workplaces - a major structural efficiency is lost. Instead of the land owner building high density housing on that land, they just retire on it forever, locking up productive land which could have housed 10 families. For this to work, all land needs to be taxed proportionate to its value. Yes, it's annoying to have to move because your house is suddenly worth $2M, but that's a pretty great problem to have, all things considered. In most places that tax free money - more than most people will earn in a lifetime.
Anyone who lives in a first world nations lives an infinitely better life than even kings did just a century or two ago. I think it is easy to see the negatives that living in our world entails, but in truth, there are so many positives, and I think it behoves us to remember that.
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