281–286 of 286 posts
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What in particular is this in response to?
If you’re going to arbitrate etiquette, lead by example. Following part of it when it suits you defeats the point of bringing it up.
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Growth only means that there is more economic activity. If you reduce the quality of houses and cars but increase the price and your profit, that's also growth. If you cure cancers, that's bad for growth if you made more profit on treatments than the cure. > Developing a more fuel efficient car is also growth, for example. One of the major economic concerns about electric vehicles is that they have fewer moving parts…
"If you cure cancers, that's bad for growth if you made more profit on treatments than the cure." That is simply wrong. If you cure cancers, you save human lives, which is worth a lot of money. You are basically falling for the broken window fallacy - breaking a window is like somebody getting cancer. You think the economy benefits because lots of doctors, nurse, undertakers and whatnot get business out of it. But yo…
The country that spends the most GDP per capita has the worst outcome for life expectancy of any industrialized nation[1]. There is no inherent monetary value to a human life in the capitalist system, as the data clearly demonstrates. The most ideal scenario in a for-profit healthcare system is to extract every dollar possible from each individual until just before they die, regardless of how old they may be at that time.
America does one better, and debtors can pursue the children of the deceased for certain medical bills in certain states.[2]
> Another fallacy to think the economy only consists of producing things
You can't consume digital goods without a physical computer. You can't get a service that is magically free of dependencies on infrastructure or electricity. There's certainly a scale of environmental sustainability, but you're always dependent on something in meatspace.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...
[2] https://www.thebalance.com/debts-from-the-estate-of-a-deceas...
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We were about to put an offer down on a home in a rural-ish area of north Nashville when we got additional information that showed it was ~120k overvalued. It still ended up with multiple offers in less that 24 hours.
Now I'm just curious which area is considered ruralish (assuming it is outside Williamson). There's a ton of buildable land left in Middle TN since there aren't too many natural boundaries, I've always found that interesting when looking at the possible density. I know it is a bit seasonal and all and anecdotal but prices are stabilizing in several TN areas where it was growing XX%, we'll see I guess.
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"If you cure cancers, that's bad for growth if you made more profit on treatments than the cure." That is simply wrong. If you cure cancers, you save human lives, which is worth a lot of money. You are basically falling for the broken window fallacy - breaking a window is like somebody getting cancer. You think the economy benefits because lots of doctors, nurse, undertakers and whatnot get business out of it. But yo…
> You think the economy benefits because lots of doctors, nurse, undertakers and whatnot get business out of it. But you are wrong. The country that spends the most GDP per capita has the worst outcome for life expectancy of any industrialized nation[1]. There is no inherent monetary value to a human life in the capitalist system, as the data clearly demonstrates. The most ideal scenario in a for-profit healthcare sy…
This does not imply the quality of the medical services is to blame. One issue of the US could be that people have too much surplus (the US is the richest country of the world), so they can eat a lot and get fat (they also have cars and don't have to exercise). Obesity then shortens their lifespans.
"There is no inherent monetary value to a human life in the capitalist system, as the data clearly demonstrates"
That's just stupid. I bet even the US spends a lot of money on protecting lives, for example install bridges and traffic lights. There is an established science to calculating the value a society assigns to human lives.
"You can't consume digital goods without a physical computer. You can't get a service that is magically free of dependencies on infrastructure or electricity. "
If a doctor saves your life, you have "consumed" his service. Maybe saving more lives would consume marginally more resources. But that also is not a given, as for example the production of medication can become more efficient. Look at the price of penicillin, or at artificial insulin. Iirc in the beginning insulin was extracted from tons of animal livers, a very wasteful process that has been replaced with something much more efficient. So now you can save more diabetic people at a fraction of the energy.
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Why?
i am sympathetic to this viewpoint because the incentives for homeowners are mostly orthogonal to that of increasing home ownership for all. why would a homeowner support increasing the supply of housing when it drives down the price of their home?
I mean, OPs idea was silly beyond belief. Even the socialists dont say: "The only person who can profit from this are the capitalists (necessarily) who first build this. The buyer can't make a profit from the re-sale".
I met a builder once that you probably have never heard of. He is a billionaire. He can profit from the sale of homes, but my parent's can't? Never mind that the tripling of the price of my parent's home over the last 22 years was driven by silly economic policies. Otherwise the house would have appreciated maybe 50%.
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They don't normally think through the consequences of this type of policy. What happens when you're barred from selling it for more than you paid? The seller will have a price cap but will have hundreds of people who want to buy it. How do they choose? Maybe lavish off-the-book gifts, or maybe they choose based on how the person looks, or perhaps they arrange consulting contracts to make up payment afterward. Would y…
That's why any sane person only wants to tax the land because taxing land reduces the value of land and increases the importance of the building on top of the land. When you tax land people don't suddenly stop producing more land.