491–500 of 660 posts
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I own vehicles in CA. There is no property tax for vehicles in CA. I can guarantee you that. I specifically own vehicles that I don’t renew with the state and there’s no problems with that.
Do you pay a vehicle license fee on those vehicles?
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Who said anything about communism? This is a false dichotomy.
The parent did: "you'd be hard pressed to find a system more effective at destroying our world"
Ecosphere destruction is tied to that sort of wealth https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/. You grow one, you grow the other.
Adding this to my reading list. I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million. Because that's the point at which you have enough wealth to live a comfortably middle class lifestyle for the rest of your life, still pass down a substantial chunk to your children, and never have to earn another cent. I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker o…
Now you have a created a society where that sort of social entrepreneurism is impossible.
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The parent did: "you'd be hard pressed to find a system more effective at destroying our world"
Fair enough. Still, I would disagree. Communism was tried and failed, its environmental effects (while bad) were therefore limited. Capitalism has endured great challenges for much longer, and despite increasing discontent with the system in many areas of the world, doesn’t appear likely to go anywhere. If that’s the case, the prodigious output of environmental harm capitalism generates won’t go anywhere either. Gree…
Look at the sky in any given photograph of china.
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> This presupposes there is some way to know what human nature is. Empirical observation. Look what happened in all the 20th century communist countries.
There is a sort of sleight of hand being performed here. Communism is being blamed for the consequences it has on its own country. Capitalism on the other hand, you can look at and say "look how well it works for this country", because meanwhile it is doing terrible things to other countries.
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You wish it was money printing. It's just plain greed. Without money printing what you'd get is even higher inflation. (Though probably only by some percentage.) Any excuse is good to raise the price if some people really need your product and it doesn't jeopardise your demand enough. (This is called demand inelasticity.) No price fall is needed or done when the excuse goes away. If you control supply side sufficient…
This is complete nonsense. The purpose of inflation as a policy is to increase employment by decreasing the real cost of labor: in short, it's sneakily stealing money from the labor class to keep the employment metric high. This is the primary cause of the poor getting poorer. Greed has nothing to do with it. Greed is linear. O(n). Inflation compounds. O(e^n).
Greed is unbound, if it is really greed. And it’s exponential, if it simply means ambitious and wise use of resources.
I would ditch the psychology economic babble.
There is certainly a case to be made that increasing employment by expanding the money supply is an addictive short term fix paid for with predictable long term damage to the purchasing power of existing laborers.
Inflation leaves valuable assets just as valuable, but undermines fixed or sticky income streams.
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It's not a difficult problem to reconcile capitalism and sustainability from a technical perspective. Just a question of political will. Carbon taxes. Water prices reflecting scarcity. Compensating people living in rain forests to not cut down their trees. Capitalism is still the best tool we have for setting prices and incentivizing efficiency. Just needs to be guided to place appropriate prices on externalities.
Water prices reflecting scarcity are not a solution for water scarcity. The problem is not enough water . You can't make water by taxing it. All you're doing is making it less accessible for people lower down the hierarchy - which makes it even scarcer, because people at the top of the hierarchy end up hoarding it and/or profiteering. Which is why price signals are one of the dumbest of all possible ways of managing…
You either accept that infinite growth in a universe with limited resources is impossible, or you're stuck loosing the rhetoric battle against physics.
I think the only sustainable way forward is to divorce our concept of wealth from growth, and ever increasing exploitation of resources.
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> Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash, if they are so inclined? Well, why should they? What if instead of a genetics lab, they want to start a flat earth research center? Or a think tank to influence policy in their favor?
Who instead should be capable of doing such a thing?
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Look at each valuable item that you use often, now look up the salary of the leader of the company that made it. Edit: You wouldn't have that item without that compensation. This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.
And yet, all of those examples are critically dependent on huge pieces of infrastructure created and distributed for free by people motivated simply by craftsmanship - Linux, the BSD kernels and many other similar things.
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Look at each valuable item that you use often, now look up the salary of the leader of the company that made it. Edit: You wouldn't have that item without that compensation. This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.
You're giving a preposterous amount of credit to executives for the value that is mostly being created by the lower level workers. So, if every CxO-level leader in the world disappeared tomorrow (or if their compensations simply got capped arbitrarily), nothing would get built ever again?