153 karma · joined August 3, 2023
Authoritarianism is on the rise in the 'Third-Way' corporatist, technocratic 'center' which is increasingly worried about losing control to perceived or real extremist parties that threaten their funding model and rock the boat.
In 2022, 81% of Mozilla's revenues were derived from Google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
Use LibreWolf instead.
2) You're ignoring communism and the far-left. Plenty of disastrous ideas are produced in a vacuum by intellectuals at universities. To give just one example: Khieu Samphan, was educated at the Sorbonne. His ideas lead to the deaths of a quarter of Cambodia's population.
3) Even if we give you 1 and 2, where do you stop? How much money should be poured into education (esp if it's the taxpayer)? Resisting fascism seems like one of those infinite 'our work is never done' things that have unbounded demands.
It's very obvious to me that today's problems are overwhelmingly technological, biological, mathematical, scientific, industrial etc. Even within these subjects, there's a mismatch between the concrete problems seen in industrial practice and the abstract and simplified ones seen in academia.
I hear the 'but any degree will give you a well rounded perspective' kind of hand wavy arguments, but these are presented without evidence, and are unfalsifiable 'runaway arguments' that have no finish line - at what point do you stop and say we're pouring resources into the wrong areas and neglecting others?
Who exactly? Where are these people in power defending physical cash or recommending an alternative monetary medium resilient to grid failure?
Are the great results they're showing just a result of the diffusion model having overfit certain celebrity faces?
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/5dc759a5c5f69aec6c7ba1959...
If money is immediately costless to produce for the entity producing it, there is still a cost and it's born by everyone else. It must be accompanied by an increase in desired goods and services to retain value. If the entity that creates the money uses it to create more value than the inflation it causes then this is a good outcome. Otherwise if the money is created to pay for unproductive behaviour like funding big wasteful armies or propping up asset bubbles, then money will ultimately become worthless and society loses, especially if the originator(s) of new money or derived credit get bailed-out, socializing the losses.
Giving money/credit creation some friction should help prevent asset bubbles: Feedback loops that get going when new money bids up collateral, which is borrowed against to create loans to bid up collateral further etc. But there are many ways to do this, and I agree that subsidizing rich people with a 'risk-free' rate of return on government bonds is not very fair or effective.
"This [CBDCs] could enable central banks to encourage or discourage certain spending in more targeted ways, for example by restricting what can be spent by people in certain areas or income brackets."
There's also an argument that higher rates are better for the environment. They are a headwind to rampant consumption. They decrease investment in areas that might not generate a return, focusing resources on existing viable businesses instead of new unproven businesses that are likely to fail (wasted energy).
The forest example is very reductive and completely ignores other costs and factors: the expected price of timber and machinery in the future, and the inflation rate in general, the cost of re-planting the forest, wages, the convexity risk of the bonds (if rates appear to be accelerating higher, your bonds will drop in value), the confidence in the government, ... and so on. It also doesn't consider that higher rates curb construction loans, and thus decrease excessive demand for timber, which results in a pile up of timber inventories initially. Businesses then react by doing less logging in future.
Zero rates (or more accurately artificially low rates) encourage gambling and waste. If I can get a cheap loan, I can go buy loads of machinery and land and start logging, whereas I wouldn't have bothered if the financing wasn't available. Financial repression in China for instance allows for the cheap financing that builds enormous ghost cities. All that sand-dredging they do emits huge amounts of CO2.
"The economy improves and so assets do become more valuable, inevitably." More pricey, no guarantees about more valuable though. Some assets may be entirely Ponzi-like and have little value, but a high price.
And anyway, if the economy is improving, homeownership / rent would be more affordable, families would only need one parent to work, the number of hours worked to buy S&P500 would be more reasonable, things like healthcare and education would be getting relatively cheaper. But artificially cheap margin debt, speculation, and financial chicanery backstopped by the central bank have lead to a lack of productive investment. Unusually high immigration and population growth without a corresponding increase in productivity causes higher prices too. Everything is getting harder from the point of view of Mr & Ms NoAssets 20-somethings who earn a wage.
The fixation of the tax-happy is on making the rich poorer in a dollar-net-worth sense. But there is no focus on making the poor richer in a purchasing power sense (what you can buy).
This requires a gradual deflation, higher reserve requirements, saving and careful investment. All currently very unpopular with the asset-rich, banker class, and thoroughly captured mainstream economics profession, who want you drowning in debt buying ever more expensive stuff, and not deferring consumption to the future.
A) If your wealth is in cash in the bank, you are providing the bank with deposits. The bank can now make cheaper loans which helps others. But if these loans default, your bank fails and you get bailed-in. Assuming no government intervention comes to save you.
B) If your wealth is in stocks or corporate bonds, you're helping to finance companies that are making stuff / providing services that people might need. But markets can go down, companies fail, and as long as there's no bail-outs, you should be able to lose it all.
C) If your wealth is in government bonds, you're obviously financing the government. But if there's no buyer-of-last-resort (central bank) for your bonds, then one dodgy policy decision by the government, a large bout of deficit spending, or a failed bond auction will wreck the value of your bonds.
D) If your wealth is only in stuff, land etc. then your wealth shouldn't grow - in fact it should fall as these deteriorate in quality, and you're taking a big hit in the form of opportunity cost by not doing anything productive with the land/stuff. If you're having to maintain this 'stuff' then you're losing money, think cost of ownership, replacing capital etc.
E) If your wealth comes from rent, then you're taking a risk, and expect costly demands from tenants and to have to keep up with a competitive market. This I accept is something of a grey area because uncompetitive markets / monopolies can exist.
F) If you're wealth is in patents, copyrights fees, royalties etc... then there may be an argument here. This is up to the government to change, similar to E but without as much risk.
The trouble with the above A-E is the inherently inflationary system we have now where markets are never allowed to go down and deflation, bank failures, and default is prevented with stimulus. It props up stocks, bonds, means assets and stuff gets more expensive nominally without doing anything, it keeps banks afloat and means bail-ins of depositors are unlikely. Rich people who acquire assets are on to a guaranteed win like you say.
The solution is not to take away the incentive to produce more wealth by a punitive income tax, but to take away the asset inflation that makes asset holders rich by doing nothing, which also makes cash holders poorer and punished for being prudent with their meagre savings.
In the real world there are usually side effects to these 'bets'. For example, a person, who is already rich, uses their wealth to purchase a factory and produce goods at a dollar price in the hope to earn more wealth. Those goods might be rejected by the market, but if accepted, they receive dollars and the rest of the world receives goods. The factory owner can only receive the dollars if others can afford to buy them. This means there is another road to ruin - fail to produce anything people want at a price they can afford and you'll soon go bust.
The buyers who receive goods in exchange for money, particularly durable labor saving goods like dishwashers/fridges/cars/computers, are surely more wealthy in some sense? In addition, the factory owner might make tools/machinery that enables other entrepreneurs to make stuff too.
Also consider ongoing costs, that capital has to be replaced (things break!), unexpected bumps in the road, finite lifespan, waste, and so on.
Which leads me to our current system: the rich have got richer through financialization, government lobbying, zero-interest financing et.c, that has allowed them to acquire assets that appreciate without a substantial increase in production.
The solution is to make rich people take much bigger, potentially ruinous, risks with their wealth on production instead of financial chicanery. More abundant goods and technology are the payoff while failure leads to liquidation of their assets, making assets more accessible to everyone else who might need them.
Deflation, and crashes are a feature, not a bug. Inflationism, stimulus, cheap money et.c helps protect workers in the short term during a downturn, but prolonged stimulus makes assets unaffordable. Worse it causes huge misallocations of capital into unproductive endeavors at no risk to the investor.
My belief is you don't 'prop-up' the big fish using the government/central bank. Then yes, you may still have inequality, but it won't be nearly as static, but more dynamic. i.e there may always be an extreme power law wealth distribution, but what's more important is there's regular turnover at the top and nobody spends too long in the top or the tail.