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Comment by lend000 | Hacker News Reader

> When they bid countries or states against each other

I have nothing to say specific to this case, but there is a market for governments (very distorted since options are very practically limited for most people, although corporations have an advantage here), and we should encourage competition in this market, as well as political markets. Competition results in better products. Washington already won me over [partially] due to not having a state income tax and yet having infrastructure comparable to my previous high-tax state, although Seattle is working hard to change that. I think the US being a federation of states that compete at some level (since it's relatively easy to move between states) is a large reason that the country has been so successful.

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> a market for governments

This is the myth of the Free Market Fairy - https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/The-Free-Market-Fairy

And the ways that "everything is a market" distorts and destroys are covered in this long read: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t...

I hope you don't truly subscribe to the ad hominem nonsense in "The Free Market Fairy." A discussion about free markets is sort of off topic anyway, so I imagine you just saw the keyword 'market' and made some assumptions.

A mathematical market doesn't need to have your political sentiment attached to it. The reality is that there are markets for pretty much everything and we can better analyze many systems by evaluating them as such (including governments), especially as it pertains to supply, demand, and incentives. Don't shut your mind out to different ideas (or try to validate your own incorrect oversimplified world view) just because you heard a teenage libertarian make an incorrect oversimplification of free markets.

But since you brought it up, it seems like you don't understand that a strong legal framework is necessary for a free market -- only the misinformed argue otherwise. In your article's example of global warming, for instance, externalities need to be captured and property rights need to be applied broadly and equally, which they are not in our current system. Most Republicans don't realize this. And most Democrats ignore all the realities and benefits of a free market economic system because the Republicans (and some libertarians) misrepresent it.

The correct pejorative is Freedom Markets™.

Competition between governments is harmful to citizens because in general, labour is never going to be as mobile as capital. And this is not just limited by regulations and laws (which it is). People just aren't going to move across borders because of politics, unless things get really bad. It just costs too much to move.

>People just aren't going to move across borders because of politics

But they'll move across borders because of the effects of politics. My parents are looking to move from NJ after they retire due to the high tax obligation- not just income, but gasoline, tolls and property taxes as well. It's more tolerable when you're working but a little less so when your income stream isn't as high.

I feel like you made the parent's point for them. Your parents are moving, yes, but only after they're no longer part of the labor force.

I live in PA on the border of NJ and I worked in NJ while I was looking to buy my house. Buying in NJ would of cut my commute at the time by 45 minutes each way but the property taxes were nearly $600 a month compared to under $1300 a year in PA for a similar home (the PA home is in a better neighborhood and isn't a townhouse as well). I made the choice to buy in PA then after a year or so found a PA job. NJ just does not provide much value for your tax dollar and I imagine many other people make the choice I made every day.

Not everyone lives close enough to a state line to relocate without changing jobs though. I personally live in a different state than my job, though not for tax purposes. It's possible to do this in the Northeast, but in few other places.

> People just aren't going to move across borders because of politics, unless things get really bad. It just costs too much to move.

Perhaps in the EU or some other part of the world, but in the United States, the population is fairly mobile.

People move from state to state all the time because of job opportunities, taxes, family, healthcare, etc...

I saw a statistic while ago that said that something like 30% of Americans moved in the last five years.

It could be helpful too. If a government is being wasteful with its money and it doesn't result in more valuable services, then another area that is doing just as good of a job with lower taxes competes for that citizen.

It's one of the few ways a government can be kept in check for excessive spending.

> Washington already won me over [partially] due to not having a state income tax and yet having infrastructure comparable to my previous high-tax state

Same thing happened with me. I moved my company from Illinois to Washington because of Illinois' draconian taxes and Washington's comparatively business-friendly atmosphere.

Of course, then things started changing in Washington and I've since moved my company to Nevada. But then, that just proves the point about American mobility and state government competition.

This.

Every time you see a trailer registered in Maine there's a very good chance that it was registered there to skirt high registration prices and onerous requirements in it's own state. Maine's making money because other states are such a pain to deal with that people would rather skirt the law.

Google "NH state liquor store" for another good example.

I would disagree with "Maine is making money"

Our state struggles to pay for road upkeep. Obviously we are not making that much money on trailer registrations. Also, IIRC, we were the first state with trailer weight limits and similar laws, meaning we couldn't possibly be THAT concerned with stealing business from other states on trailer registration.

Maybe Maine's lax trailer laws come from everyone and their mother owning a trailer for camping, ATV's and the like? No average Mainer wants to pay huge fees just so they can hit the trails on the weekend.

>Our state struggles to pay for road upkeep. Obviously we are not making that much money on trailer registrations. Also, IIRC, we were the first state with trailer weight limits and similar laws, meaning we couldn't possibly be THAT concerned with stealing business from other states on trailer registration

Well at ~$10/trailer/yr you're not making much money but it's not nothing. The point is that other states make trailer registration such a hassle that people would rather skirt the law in their own state and pay $20/yr to have some shell corp in Maine register their trailers than do it locally. As an aside this is particularly ass backwards when you consider that those states tend to be the states that would benefit most from people buying lighter vehicles for daily use and covering the edge case with a trailer instead of buying a heavier vehicle (pickup, van, etc) for daily use.

IMO the roads are in perfectly good shape for the number of mile/person or miles/tax dollar.

>Maybe Maine's lax trailer laws come from everyone and their mother owning a trailer for camping, ATV's and the like? No average Mainer wants to pay huge fees just so they can hit the trails on the weekend.

Is this the chicken or the egg?

If "progressive" WA adopted "conservative" ID's tax regime, resulting in roughly ~$2.5b/yr extra revenue, WA would have much better infrastructure.

Local businesses like Boeing have been begging Olympia to invest, better maintain infrastructure (for as long as I remember). But those efforts are always rebuffed by the anti-tax jihadists.

Per Logic of Collective Action, the reason tax regimes should be normalized (local, state, national, international) is to minimize cheating (defecting).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

> WA would have much better infrastructure

Supply and demand does not care whether your state votes red or blue. You've put forth two common misconceptions here -- one stems from a lack of economics training (that increasing prices always increases revenue), the other is naive (that the more money the government receives, the better the results).

If WA raised taxes (analog -- prices), demand decreases and fewer people like me move there for the tax benefits. More immediately, fewer large businesses headquarter there. Residents spend most of their money in WA so this reduces sales tax receipts, and transitively, the entire WA money supply. In the immediate term, it's obviously going to raise their tax receipts significantly. But in the long term, the effects could be quite negative, eventually even reducing inflation-adjusted tax receipts, if they really mess things up.

> Per Logic of Collective Action, the reason tax regimes should be normalized (local, state, national, international) is to minimize cheating (defecting).

Exactly what I disagreed with in my original post, but I guess we can agree to disagree... I do not think it is cheating to go somewhere that more efficiently spends your tax dollars. I suspect you think you would rather live in a society where you do not have as many choices.

>Washington already won me over [partially] due to not having a state income tax and yet having infrastructure comparable to my previous high-tax state, although Seattle is working hard to change that.

Just curious- how does Washington get funding without income tax?

I would assume through sales tax & property taxes.

Or here in New Hampshire we do it almost exclusively on property taxes which has an obvious effect: rich towns have better services than poor towns.

WA has an extremely complicated business tax on receipts where you have to throw a dart and guess which category your takings fall under.

Very high sales tax and very high propety tax. No worries, governments will always want more money and more time, we will be just like California before long.

Competition between governments results in you as product beeing sold for cheap, without rights and recursions against the company and your health beeing cast aside as obsticle.

Even the american post-problem lawsuit culture will fail to hold internationals accountable, once the managed to get that part of law as negotiatable into arbitration courts.

How somebody can willingly sew on the branch he sits upon- and declare that reasonable- can you expalin this to me?

It's discouraged to mention people's spelling/grammar on HN, provided the intended meaning is clear, but in this case the mistakes are obscuring your meaning in a way that's likely to bring downvotes. I'm guessing that you are not a native English speaker, or possibly using someone else's phone, so please accept these notes as constructive encouragement.

> recursions

Probably meant "repercussions"

> beeing

being

> obsticle

obstacle

> once the managed to get that part of law as negotiatable into arbitration courts.

Not sure of intended meaning, but "the" is probably "they"

> negotiatable negotiable

> sew saw

> expalin explain

Also, the writer's name was Ernest Hemingway. He was from Illinois, despite his time in Spain.

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