The hardest part of this to me to deal with is that it’s the truth. For decades, the conservative line was if you give people money they’ll just blow it on gambling and booze. Turns out it’s true.
Bunch of people lost money. Some of them got rich. Booze is good and gambling is fun and it’s ok to blow their own money on exactly the things that everyone else blows their money on.
(This hits on the idea of “accredited investor,” and I have such a hard time not calling out that it’s a mechanism for already-rich people to participate in every deal that could make not-rich people rich. And that there are very few other ways to earn a fortune when you only have $10k in the bank. I lost my dad’s $11k when mt Gox exploded, which is objectively stupid. Meanwhile my friend is now a multi millionaire simply because he didn’t lose his coins and didn’t sell them. Was he stupid? Did I blow my money on gambling, but he was just lucky?)
Didn’t mean to rant, but it is what it is. You’re not wrong though.
I agree that the rules are overly crude and that in principle there should be some more equitable way to achieve the same way. But I'm also very confident that those rules have stopped a lot of people losing all their money and killing themselves.
> Meanwhile my friend is now a multi millionaire simply because he didn’t lose his coins and didn’t sell them. Was he stupid? Did I blow my money on gambling, but he was just lucky?
Yes. You both did a stupid gamble and one of you got lucky for now. There's no broader lesson to take from that.
I agree with your overall point, but to be clear, we're talking about day trading. There's a lot of arguments you could have about banning casinos, pro and con, but "hey, some poor person might win big on the quarter slot machines" isn't a good argument.
Also, the median "accredited investor" is a dentist from Topeka who's about to get suckered by an advance fee fraud. Being an accredited investor doesn't automatically give you access to good deals. There just isn't a pool of amazing investments out there hungry for capital but being stopped by investor protection laws. (But there is a pool of scams...)
(Note that I'm not saying that the system is good or fair or just; I'm just saying mechanically, accredited investor laws aren't the part of the system stopping you from getting rich.)
Accredited investors suck at due diligence as is, and Joe Everyman can barely understand their own bank statement, so those rules exist to prevent them from getting raked by extremely questionable investment offers.
It's absurd Americans judging at normal people spending money, but same people ok with companies making record profit during pandemic, the minimum wage limit etc. It's pathetic.
https://jsri.msu.edu/publications/nexo/vol-xxv/no-1-fall-202...
Kurzarbeit was one of the main reasons my employer survived the ill-timed purchase of another German industrial giant (deal done right before the 2008-9 financial crisis kicked off, payment due during said financial crisis) without having to lay people off, and left it in the position to get right back into the game once the world economy started improving. And, of course, spared thousands of working people a lot of misery.
Worked as designed for the benefit of the minor nobility... er, "job creators".
Let the privileged folks have their fun, so the unprivileged can eat and not worry so much.
Causes asset inflation making them out of reach for the 'unprivileged'. See housing market.
No one expects housing to appreciate (except in limited, specific situations) and then no one votes or sets policy specifically to prop up prices. There’s a dynamic market with plenty of development and supply in the right types of housing and price points and everyone’s happy pretty much.
The land does appreciate in Japan though. And if they built good homes, they would too. But they choose not to.
The untargeted stimulus just enabled mob madness and scams paid for by tax dollars. Wealth redistribution from the tax payer to the dishonest and lucky.
Most people just have no financial skills and will just get slaughtered on the stock markets. Others refuse to save money for their retirement at all.
What we had, in effect, was the closest thing we will ever get to a nationwide short-term UBI experiment and it was a complete disaster.
The worst fears about UBI were realized with just a few payments: people gambling with the money, creating stock bubbles with meme stocks, and contributing to a rapid rise in inflation.
People will say that wasn't really UBI -- but it's the closest we have ever been to it and probably the closest practical implementation we could ever expect from our government, and with "real" UBI people would have been given even more free money.
Everyone knows UBI can’t possibly work but enough people who are or think they are smart will find every way possible to convince themselves and others it not only can work but it’s obvious why it will. Ignoring thousands of years of humans that said “no”.
We have a paleo-phobia problem today where for whatever reason there are a lot of people that are pretty sure the entire history of humanity has been wrong about most things and we are the fortunate ones to know better, today. Without ever considering that we are possibly just cascading our problems due to our unwise choices.
Regardless, history has shown that decadence is the end of a culture.
Which makes sense, because it wasn't. A key point of UBI is its consistency: you know you are getting that money every month, indefinitely, and therefore can plan/budget accordingly.
A one-time payment? Okay, sure, I can use that to cover my rent this month, but then it's not doing me any good. So why pay my rent with it when I can go gamble with it and maybe luck out?
> and with "real" UBI people would have been given even more free money.
tldr: the point isn't the amount of money, it's the consistency.