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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

These are policy ideas, which is to say, actions that might be taken by the government. I can see how the government might provide education, build infrastructure, encourage entrepreneurship, boost immigration, and perform basic research. I don't see how the government could cause less greed on the part of business owners. That may be a solution in the sense that if it happened it would work, but how would you make that happen?

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You'd enact redistributive tax and spending policies and high minimum wages. You'd reduce government spending for corporations. You'd make it difficult to fire workers.

You'd make the U.S. more like Europe, basically.

Europe has its own problems, despite the many things it does right, because it still entrenches the rent-extraction powers of the elite. In fact, it often does so more than the USA: real-estate often isn't taxed at anything like proportional rates in some European countries, and European laws are often harsher on debtors and bankrupt entrepreneurs than American ones.

I'd put that in a different category than "less greed." What you're doing is adjusting the consequences of the greed, but not directly adjusting people's emotional states and desires. You might even indirectly adjust the emotion, but to describe what you're actually doing you'd describe it as you have here, not "less greed."

It's the difference between describing what you'll do and what you want to happen. Too many people simply state the latter and then declare victory. "Why don't we just solve global warming by producing less CO2?" To me, "less greed" is solidly in that category.

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