Thank you for the mostly common sense. To me, the root cause is:
- Central planners in government who think they're able to positively control and shape society ( because they know better than 'we' do )
- Central planners in government who think they're able to positively control and shape society ( because they know better than 'we' do )
> real wages decreasing since 1980
This is the problematic outcome itself, not one of the specific causes.
> the commoditizing of labor (e.g. janitorial companies, the "sharing economy")
Caused by labor laws that make hiring full time employees more expensive (e.g. employer-provided healthcare mandates, see below), pushing businesses to hire temporary contractors from contracting companies that take a cut of the wages rather than forming stable long-term employment relationships directly with specific individuals.
> ever-decreasing investment in infrastructure
This is obviously a call for more government spending on infrastructure, which I would agree with personally, but there is actually a "this is still the government's fault" Libertarian position on this -- the government provides crumbling-but-free infrastructure which destroys the private market for providing the same things. If they didn't provide it at all then the market would invest more in it, so the theory goes.
> tying wealth to real estate prices
Unambiguous case of government regulations (zoning laws, loan interest subsidies) screwing things up.
> an educational system that leaves many young people mired in debt
Federal loan interest subsidies again.
> tying healthcare to employment and the price of healthcare in general.
More bad regulations: Tax subsidies and regulatory requirements for employer-provided healthcare, laws that encourage "health insurance" that covers everyday medicine rather than actual insurance against atypically large costs, which inhibits consumers from being price sensitive and thereby inflates healthcare costs.
> mass incarceration destroying families and individuals
Obvious case of "repeal the laws" as the solution.
> regulatory capture allowing big businesses to beat down all the small ones
Large companies control the regulatory bodies for their industry and purposely have rules enacted that favor large scale entities. Remove the rules, restore competition.
> a monoculture that tremendously decreases resiliency
Outcome of bad regulations again -- regulatory capture producing monopolies/oligopolies, regulations mandating specific solutions instead of facilitating multiple alternative solutions, high regulatory compliance costs destroying small businesses, monoculture of federal programs themselves that displace diverse programs operated by localities or private industry, etc.
There is a completely valid position that eliminating regulations could solve all of these.
What you cite as problematic regulation is interesting. I'm not sure regulation is to blame for megacorp monopolies. When you have so much money that you can bury any competition, and buy up all the regulators, regulation is effectively useless.
It seems having too much money/power is the real problem. Regulation can only stop bad behavior if regulators have more power than the regulated. That can lead to a stagnation of innovation though.
I kind of feel like we need more monetary checks and balances. Currently, the court system is extremely skewed in favor of the wealthy. Most people can't afford to go to court to protect their interests, so those with more money can just walk all over whoever they want.
It's not just useless, it's actively harmful. The regulations are created at the behest of the megacorp to harm prospective competitors.
The problem is we can sit here and agree that we need better regulations, and call Congress and tell them to pass better regulations, and then a 5000 page bill comes up for a vote. Normal people don't have time to understand what's in it, but megacorp's lawyers do. So if it's something they like it sails right through and if it's something they hate they pay for a truckload of sand to be poured into the gears so it never goes anywhere.
So the alternatives are A) "have megacorp's preferred regulations" or B) "stop federally regulating that thing" and there is no third option on the table. Which do you choose?
"Get a third option" would be great, if anybody knew how to actually do that. But every time anybody has claimed they're going to do it in the last century or so we just end up with option A instead.
It'd be great if we still had Teddy Roosevelt in there, but we don't, and he's not even on the ballot.
> It seems having too much money/power is the real problem. Regulation can only stop bad behavior if regulators have more power than the regulated. That can lead to a stagnation of innovation though.
Fixing this tends to have counterintuitive solutions.
People are always talking about "the 1%" as if the problem is people, but the main problem is really corporations. There is no natural person with more money than Apple Inc.
And the biggest reason for that is that we have a tax system that rewards huge multinational corporations hoarding cash. The only reason the shareholders don't demand their take of the profits is that they know that actually taking them causes a large amount of taxes to be due to both the company and the shareholder. So they take their gains as share price appreciation, which has preferential tax treatment but leaves the huge pile of money inside the corporation.
There are two main things needed to fix that. The first is to replace corporate income tax with VAT, so there is no more incentive for corporations to hold money offshore. And the second is to defer taxes when dividends or capital gains are immediately reinvested, so that an investor who takes profits from a megacorp and invests them in a small or medium business doesn't immediately owe a bunch of taxes, when leaving the cash in the megacorp wouldn't.
The problem is both of these policies will inevitably get characterized as helping the rich, even though their effect is to eliminate the relative costs of moving profits from megacorps to smaller businesses.
From my experience, it feels like there are so many pitfalls and financial traps designed to catch people moving from the middle class on up. Once you make it to 10 Million +, you can coast from there with no financial burdens, but until then there is always something to get you.
The IRS will demand you pay tax on 100 million dollars right that minute. Obviously, this would be impossible since you cannot sell your stock, and it's value is only based on speculative appraisals.
Say you somehow got a loan to pay that tax up front. Say the tax was 20 million dollars. Then google goes belly up and your stock becomes worthless.
Too bad so sad! You are on the hook for paying back that 20 million dollars.