51–60 of 160 posts
Broockman: I’m sure that at least some of their political views have to do with self-interest.
I'm pro-Left everything, except when it effects my huge revenue stream.
Go figure.
The low-regulation approach seem great until you find out how far businesses will go to cut their costs and increase profits: you end up with situations like flammable cladding installed on high-rise towers, horse meat sold as beef, or bleach sold as a cure for Covid-19 (one of these may be fictional). The line between legitimate business and scam becomes impossible to define.
If you look at British Common Law many of these problems have legal precedents that would be evolved based on real world cases.
This is what economist like Armen Alchian, James M. Buchanan, F.A. Hayek and many others have been arguing and researching for decades.
There are of course criticism to that approach, but to just dismiss it as if it didn't exist is not fair.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> very strong union sector Why is this not free market? Employees are part of the market as well. At some point you may argue that the unions form a cartel maybe. But that is another sign of a free (from state) market
I think we've been trained to fixate on labels, because it limits our tools to solve problems, and the people in power don't want us solving these kinds of problems. Depending on which labels you (general you) ascribe to yourself, most ideas are DOA, because they don't fit in your identity box. Who cares if it's free market or not? A strong union presence is significantly more effective than a minimum wage. One amoun…
Citation, please? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm begging you, with tears in my eyes, for a citation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scaling what Denmark is doing for its population of ~5 million to the 300+ million people of the US is way harder than it looks at a first sight. To say nothing of the way more diverse human capital of the US.
==To say nothing of the way more diverse human capital of the US.== It actually sounds like there is something you want to say about human capital diversity. Why not say it?
After we entered the EU that Roma population mostly emigrated to wealthier countries out West, including Denmark, which wealthier countries were as bad as us at integrating them (including the beloved Denmark or Norway).
All this to say that seeing many Americans in here daydreaming about life in countries like Denmark or Sweden is very ubermensch-y. Yes, when you have a small, privileged and mostly white population things are easy, only when it gets mixed up things start becoming complicated.
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The law that applies/ought to apply is the one against fraud in the beef example.
One must first outline what “beef” is before you can assign fraud. Outlining what makes something “beef” is textbook regulation.
It has many advantages compared to a system where the government to literally pre-define every single thing in the economy and create specific regulation and test procedures for it, even if in most cases these things are not needed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we've been trained to fixate on labels, because it limits our tools to solve problems, and the people in power don't want us solving these kinds of problems. Depending on which labels you (general you) ascribe to yourself, most ideas are DOA, because they don't fit in your identity box. Who cares if it's free market or not? A strong union presence is significantly more effective than a minimum wage. One amoun…
I don't think I've ever seen anything resembling a free market in labour, and I doubt that it would be tolerated. It would be a market where wage rates could go up or down depending on economic conditions. In reality, people get very unhappy if wages go down and companies are more likely to cut costs by sacking staff. It would be a market where if you were unemployed, but qualified, you could approach a company and o…
Part of the intent behind an employment contract is that the employee will mostly not have to bear risk in the business itself, or in market conditions. That's a legitimate demand, but it does imply that you'll be paid quite a bit less for your effort than if you really were bearing that risk of having your earnings fall due to no fault of your own - let alone being outright sacked because someone else has volunteered to do the same job for cheaper.
I think leaving these broad social insurance considerations to wholly private contracting between employees and businesses is a very bad deal for workers, and also explains why e.g. the least pleasant jobs can pay so little. A UBI-like arrangement would allow us to get a lot closer to the "truly" free market in labor you posit here.
> So their overall approach is unique: Let the markets operate how they should and redistribute income after the fact. Some people have called this new type of political animal the “liberaltarian.” That is, of course, the model that Nordic social democracies have followed for many years now. Denmark is by many measures significantly more free-market than the US; note their absence of minimum wage, mostly privatised f…
Maybe it’s that I have very weird friends, but pretty much no libertarian I’ve met has defended zero redistribution. They all hate the way it’s done now, and favor other arrangements like a negative income tax or UBI (as a substitute for government-run services). I haven’t seen all the questionnaire, but the questions shown in the article could be read both ways.
Libertarian and redistribution have an obvious logic conflict, so you may be right about very weird friends. Libertarian base idea is freedom, as much as possible; redistribution is the opposite of freedom because you work, earn money and someone comes and takes it from you. Makes sense?
But I'm sure you know better what they believe.
This is by no means a new political stance: liberaltarians used to be known as "left-wing libertarians" or, somewhat jocularly, "bleeding-heart libertarians" but the gist was pretty much the same.
Yep, there is indeed such a thing as left-libertarianism. Last time I checked, its proponents were trying pretty hard to argue that it's not an outright contradiction.
How is it a contradiction?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
European-style redistribution is extremely costly for what it achieves. It means that the government has to take or transfer a sizeable fraction of GDP via taxation, while also burdening the economy as a whole with excess regulation (e.g. the firm size regulations that were mentioned elsewhere in the comments, and many others). It would be very surprising if there was no way of achieving comparable results with less…
It will be very surprising if there is a way to achieve comparable results with significantly less burden on others. European countries have looked for it for 40 years now.
Look at how hard it was for German to reform its social system in 90/00s for example. And German was one of the countries that actually achieved significant reforms while many others didn't.