Governments should compete for residents, not businesses • Hacker News Board

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#201

Post by Hermitian909 » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:02 PM UTC

notch898a wrote: post #146

Hermitian909 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Schools are paid by property tax, but every public school in every jurisdiction I've ever lived in has been inferior to private while costing me almost as much via property tax. Former educator: This mostly comes down to being able to select for students from house holds that have large disposable income and care enough about their child's education to send them to a private school. This usually gets you a lot of b…

Seems like this could be improved by mandating no more than 2x disparity between spending on kids in the same grade level. Disruptors can be kicked into the gladiator camps or emancipated if they think they're so independent on what they can do.

Actual measurement for most disruptions is really hard because it usually manifests in things like "Timmy was really distracting in class during the Math lesson". Quantifying that is difficult.

Capping spending ratios would also be horrific for the US specifically because we implement many of our social welfare programs for kids through the schools: school lunches, speech therapy, etc. (incidentally, this overinflates our spending on students relative to peer nations). You'd be relegating poor kids to even worse outcomes than they already face which would have some seriously negative downstream effects once they become adults.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#202

Post by WaitWaitWha » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

cyclecount wrote: post #6

This line of thinking comes up often on HN but it ignores the central reason for governments to enact borders, a rather modern invention. Governments (at the behest of businesses) enforce borders so that labor cannot effectively organise. A border exists often for workers only, but is mostly a legal fiction that corporations can easily navigate. The most common example for the Americans reading this is NAFTA, which m…

>This line of thinking comes up often on HN but it ignores the central reason for governments to enact borders, a rather modern invention.

Would you be kind and provide some scholarly proof for the rather modern invention? It might not have been called "border" and have the gate with digital IDs to pass by but well defined (for their time) territories existed for thousands of years as evidenced by territory disputes between bordering sovereign groups in all lived-on continents.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#203

Post by fnordpiglet » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:05 PM UTC

gameman144 wrote: post #173

fnordpiglet wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constitution and bill of rights and the effective government the founding fathers created that ensures the continuation of those law bodies. The lack of those blessings from the past is what prevents others. It’s no fault of the people who live here or there today for the situation we are in. If George Washington had accepted a crown when offered we would be just as screwed up.

> The lack of those blessings from the past is what prevents others. I think this strongly discounts the agency of individuals. In our time these are certainly blessings, but they had to be fought for by their contemporaries.

It’s true, but the platform and framework of that fight is what has kept it stable over time. That is what we inherited. It’s also very fragile, and that’s where the contemporary fight happens to preserve it. But without the framework, the fight is a unstable and degenerates quickly into a pretty gnarly state. That’s why the founders struggled so hard - their writings at the time on these very subjects are profound and helpful in framing how lucky we are, but also how typical our problems are in history.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#204

Post by mannerheim » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:05 PM UTC

chewz wrote: post #179

That was true until end of XIX century. Especially so in XIX century. For a person a move was quite simple, sometimes just few miles over the border. But moving a business, brick-and-mortar business like coal-mine or brewery was hard. That kept personal taxes low and business taxes high. But XX century changed that.

People forget that modern nation states are a very recent, post-democratic construct, and in the past, states competed for people all the time; the fact that these people spoke a different language and had a different ethnicity mattered little to a monarch who themselves might not have belonged to the ethnicity of the country they ruled.

Hence the Prussians bringing Poles to work on the farms in Silesia abandoned by Germans for the factories in the Ruhr, the Russians bringing Mennonites to settle the Volga (of course, it helped that the imperial family was German), the Austrians encouraging Serbs to exchange Ottoman for Habsburg rule, and many more such cases.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#205

Post by ncpa-cpl » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:05 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #88

boh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really bizarre that state sovereignty is just considered a business practice. No it's not a "modern invention" to "enact" borders. Nor does labor organizing have anything to do with its enforcement. Corporate-centric culture doesn't do well in explaining the world. I'd suggest a less narrow viewpoint.

It's a modern (a 'temporary measure' enacted in WW1) invention to enact a passport-controlled system of travel and residency across the entire world. Border control prior to it was more focused on customs taxes, and in some countries, keeping undesirable races/religions out. We have decided the latter is wrong, so instead of directly banning, say, Chinese or Jewish immigration, we replaced it with quotas on country o…

> It's a modern (a 'temporary measure' enacted in WW1) invention to enact a passport-controlled system of travel and residency across the entire world.

I wonder if the same will happen to online travel pre-entry-authorizations.

During Covid many countries implemented pre-entry-authorizations, similar to US ESTA or Canadian ETA.

Even if the Covid emergency state has been over, some countries that didn't have this forms before, still require them for travel.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#206

Post by tclancy » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:08 PM UTC

hermannj314 wrote: post #16

I've owned houses in two cities in my life. One called itself "A developer-friendly community" and the other "A healthy community" The cities were organized around their taglines. One was 300 years old and focused on parks, trails, conservancy, and community centers. The other a younger city focused on growth and sprawl, tax abatements, and new businesses. You should live where the government aligns with your phase o…

>entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older

I get what you probably meant, but this is a really strong statement. Our town is struggling with spiraling property taxes and it is forcing long-term residents out. I really feel for older people who've had decades of a social circle, have people to help them with things they can no longer do, etc. You can't move somewhere else and replicate that.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#207

Post by fnordpiglet » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:09 PM UTC

nhchris wrote: post #176

fnordpiglet wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true at all, there were often famines and other natural disasters that made it impossible to live in a region and people just migrated. It happened constantly. Watching the children in Ethiopia starving to death, I couldn’t help but wonder how we felt forcing people to live in an emergent desert to death by starvation was better if we just wrote a song about it - “We are the world.” If that were true, why…

Ethiopia is an interesting example, but not of scarcity. While my country's population grew by a mere 40% since 1950 (and has been stagnant the last few decades), Ethiopia's grew by 534%, and shows no signs of slowing: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ethiopia-popu... Had we grown at their pace, we'd also be experiencing famines. As for why they couldn't leave - you can ask their neighbors. The West is…

At the time I’m talking about the cause of the famine was an extreme drought, and all sorts of other problems as you allude to. More than population growth was war and instability - all great reasons to migrate if you could, but the lack of food is an even more common and compelling reason to migrate throughout human history regardless of the reason.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983–1985_famine_in_Ethiopia

I didn’t assert the west should unilaterally open their borders. I stated that borders are inhuman - as humans are naturally migratory. Taking that to the real world, that would mean their neighbors should open borders as well - not just to Ethiopians, but to everyone.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#208

Post by bell-cot » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:11 PM UTC

notch898a wrote: post #146

Hermitian909 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Schools are paid by property tax, but every public school in every jurisdiction I've ever lived in has been inferior to private while costing me almost as much via property tax. Former educator: This mostly comes down to being able to select for students from house holds that have large disposable income and care enough about their child's education to send them to a private school. This usually gets you a lot of b…

Seems like this could be improved by mandating no more than 2x disparity between spending on kids in the same grade level. Disruptors can be kicked into the gladiator camps or emancipated if they think they're so independent on what they can do.

IIR, the biggest barrier to that idea is the kids with special needs, and either the ADA or similar laws. And at least in some states, "Chris has really special medical needs" can be a license to bleed the school district to financial ruin.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#209

Post by notch898a » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #185

notch898a wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider something like 1/3 of Americans have a criminal history. Maybe 1 of 30 of those are incapable of living in society. Keeping out fugitives makes sense but I totally disagree with keeping out criminals, particularly when in much of the world criminal often just means you did something the government didn't like.

That includes arrest records, not just convictions. About 3% of the population has served any time in prison, and about 8% of the population have been convicted of a felony. https://news.uga.edu/total-us-population-with-felony-convict...

Are you familiar with the US immigration system? That is exactly what they consider in criminal history. What they examine includes arrests, not just convictions, so it's precisely the stat we want.

See form I-485 for PR:

  24.  Have you EVER been arrested, cited, charged, or detained for any reason by any law enforcement officer (including but not limited to any U.S. immigration official or any official of the U.S. armed forces or U.S. Coast Guard)?

I'm not sure what we're talking about if you're excluding non-convicted arrests, but it aint immigration.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#210

Post by scetron » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #206

hermannj314 wrote: post #16

I've owned houses in two cities in my life. One called itself "A developer-friendly community" and the other "A healthy community" The cities were organized around their taglines. One was 300 years old and focused on parks, trails, conservancy, and community centers. The other a younger city focused on growth and sprawl, tax abatements, and new businesses. You should live where the government aligns with your phase o…

>entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older I get what you probably meant, but this is a really strong statement. Our town is struggling with spiraling property taxes and it is forcing long-term residents out. I really feel for older people who've had decades of a social circle, have people to help them with things they can no longer do, etc. You can't move somewhere else and replicate that.

Indeed! Not everyone has the capability to up and move. I've recently heard that having a good community around you is one of the best things for healthy longevity, it becomes even more difficult to do this.

It also happens to be an issue that I am facing, move for more closer alignment to my ideals and abandon my established community, or stay and try to change where I am.