Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

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>>You are totally missing the point, they are competing for a scarce resource and driving up it's prices only to waste it. They are creating a housing crisis.

Public sector workers also buy investment properties, just not the most expensive properties with spectacular price tags.

And in any case, that can be addressed directly, with a land tax. Any wasteful use of the scarce resource would then be heavily penalized, with those who engage in its waste paying a significant premium to society at large.

>>Not that the capital is used productively, or deployed efficiency in the real world, just that imaginary numbers are growing in a spreadsheet

Generally, good investments, that produce large private returns, increase the productivity of the economy. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't see such a strong correlation between liberalization of entrepreneurship/private-enterprise laws, and economic growth.

See China's pro-market reforms:

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

Or China's special economic zones. Or South vs North Korea, Or West vs East Germany. Or pre-Chavez and post-Chavez Venezuela. Or the pre-social-democracy and post-social-democracy West.

Post social-democracy west had decreasing social mobility and minimal wage growth for 40 years, and OECD and every serious economist has written about this extensively:

https://www.oecd.org/economy/outlook/Decoupling-of-wages-fro...

"Liberalisation of entrepreneurship"

Are we conflating cutting red tape and enabling tax evasion?

By post-social-democracy, I am referring to the period after which social democracy was instituted, meaning the social democracy era.

See the rapid transition to social democracy:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

And you're right, the results have been terrible.

>>Are we conflating cutting red tape and enabling tax evasion?

I'm making the point that private returns are generally associated with increases in economic efficiency, as evidenced by the correlation between laws permitting private enterprise, and more rapid economic growth. Your earlier comment suggested making money in the market is not associated with productivity increases.

Please find a single respectable historian of economy or similar that shares the view that the current era is the era of social democracy rather than neoliberalism and large scale privatizations of formerly social democratic mixed economies?

But since you are HNs most blatant free market fundamentalist (proven by the ridiculous claim above that social spending alone constitutes social democracy, not to even mention the revisionism) I'm not expecting much more than tone policing.

Narratives, popularized by the elite, like the very large and highly paid public sector bureaucracy, are irrelevant to the truth. The truth is revealed by scientific evidence, which in the social sciences, constitutes socioeconomic statistics. What are your thoughts on the statistics I provided earlier, which I'll reproduce here:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

?

>>proven by the ridiculous claim above that social spending alone constitutes social democracy, not to even mention the revisionism

You should ask yourself why you are so angry and so intent on trying to discredit my completely reasonable effort to support my position, while the evidence you yourself provided is so absurdly flimsy, like minimum wage (which only affects 4% of jobs) not rising fast enough, and social mobility decreasing (which could very plausibly be due to any number of anti-free-market developments, like 1. growing regulatory restrictions stratifying the position of incumbents in the market, 2. growing government spending creating a more nepotistic economy that favors elite interests, like public sector unions, who tend to have the strongest political connections).

I have to ask, given around 40% of the economy now consists of the state, or those funded by it: do you perhaps have a financial conflict of interest in this debate? Do you work in the public sector, or otherwise hold a unionized job, which would make you a direct beneficiary of the state growing its control over the economy?

But to your point: the share of the economy that is forcefully redistributed by the state, for the purpose of funding social welfare programs, is in fact a completely reasonable proxy for the extent to which social democracy plays a role in a society. Do you have a more direct proxy?

As an aside, trying to gaslight critics of the social democratic establishment with this kind of bad-faith response profoundly damages the public discourse, and I urge you to stop doing it.

Extra ordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence to warrant the effort. A single generic social spending figure doesn't meet that.

Why won't you just provide a single respectable, non-lobbyist, historian/economists that supports your claim?

A massive increase in overall social welfare spending, as a share of GDP, is indeed an strong indication of a move toward a more social democratic economic structure. What contorted theory do you have to come up with to explain how it wouldn't indicate such?

Why ignore statistics and look for an argument from authority?

Alright, since you can't even come up with a single one it's pointless to spend any effort on extraordinary claims that have no backing beyond your own strange imagination. And no, a single social spending figure doesn't constitute an ideological era of social democracy. It's an absurd and frankly pathetic suggestion. If you actually interested in an objective look at this you'd have an easy time googling up mountains of work that goes against your claim of an social democratic era, but that would obviously be off-brand to a free market fanatic trying to justify why the last 30-40 years of neoliberalism is finally starting to crack.

This is not a 'social democracy era', stop worshiping the invisible hand and pick up a book on economics.

I recommend you look at the graph I provided, which shows how massively the West has shifted to social democracy.

"Public sector workers also buy investment properties"

I am really confused by this obsesssion with public sector workers?

"We should do drugs"

"Public sector workers do drugs too!"

The money not being taxed, due to tax havens, would not be being spent more efficiently if it had been taxed. All the inefficiencies you refer to would be manifested as a result of the income that taxation would provide to the public sector.

The efficiency of 'investment' pf the money sitting in tax heavens is 0%. You can't be less efficient

No, the money in tax havens is invested back into the real economy via offshore corporations that operate and invest throughout the world.

I recommend you study up on how investment finance works, and stop assuming that any characterization of the world that helps to protect rich people's profits is a lie to hoodwink the masses. That's a common reaction, and leads to erronous beliefs about the world. Wealth accumulation in the market is not zero-sum.

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/04/we-have-an-ingrained-an...

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