kenmicklas

I think that's an incomplete summary; a major driver of this is the difference in availability of success (at least according to older generation's standards) between older and younger generations.

Divide evenly by number of people? It's really not that difficult.

Instead of calling my argument horrendous with no justification, maybe you could try engaging with it. I, too, would like to just call you a right-wing libertarian nutjob or something like that and move on with life, but hopefully something better can happen. :)

> Either way the child is inheriting economic wealth they didn't produce

There isn't a whole lot. But you're missing the point of parenting. Hint: it's not financial support. You can't write a baby a check for $1M, plop it down in an empty house and expect it to live a good life. After you die you're not doing any of the stuff that actually makes having a parent valuable to a child relative to receiving the necessary financial support (which will not even be available to working class children under your proposed system).

Maybe if you were confident your children would be adequately taken care of if you died, you wouldn't have to work so hard saving up a nest egg and would actually have more time to be a parent.

Nope. I would argue that most parents want that because the economic system we live in compels them to.

Actually, we live in quite a dystopian reality. Your only argument is a slippery slope fallacy. I never said that a child should not benefit from their caretakers. Only that they should not inherit economic wealth which they did not produce.

Yes that is exactly what I am saying. UBI would raise rents and therefore encourage sprawl.

And I don't want you to be able to do that. If this is supposed to be a rational position you're going to need more justification than "you want it".

Why not? Then the wealth can be distributed to everyone fairly. Having this safety net available for everyone and not just the rich would reduce the need for wealth hoarding in the first place. Your ideology has no justification besides your own particular interest in the class position of your offspring.

That's exactly the problem. It would encourage unsustainable sprawl to a massive degree.

I think the bigger issue than lending is that if it's not funded with a land value tax then all the increase in income will be eaten up in rent.

That's not wage theft though. You can't be paid after you're dead. Inheritance is just legalized aristocracy.

I think these enormous tracts of suburban and rural land that were populated with government subsidies and no real economic reason to exist should be slowly and gracefully depopulated, with people settling denser areas (which we have a scarcity of, due to racially motivated zoning laws and other policies). We also need to do a better job of limiting sprawl so that people living in cities are closer to nature and don't have to travel through hundreds of miles of suburbs to "escape".

People act as if all these small towns are growing our food and are vital for the national economy when in reality the vast majority of them consist simply of the industry required for their local suburban/rural existence (schools, supermarkets, hospitals, road maintenance, etc.).

The places that are actually productive (e.g. large agricultural regions) of course have to stay but these are relatively not so populated to begin with (and use less and less labor every year). People have no idea of the magnitude of distortion that props up the myth of the small town in America.

Policywise, I think a gradually introduced land value tax and carbon tax (replacing to some degree property and income taxes) could do a lot to enact this restructuring in a "natural" way.

> They offer a certain quality of life many desire.

But at an enormous cost to the environment, tax base, and economic resilience of society.

It's legitimate for people in the cities to ask whether they want to keep subsidizing this lifestyle, and whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved.

How is it science? We literally have direct empirical evidence that suggests the contrary, but physicists do complicated mental gymnastics to come up with other explanations that fit their preconceived notions better.

It's only inconsistent if you assume information can't travel faster than the speed of light, for which there is no basis besides gospel.

It turns out if you make unjustified assumptions (information can't travel faster than light) you can make unjustified conclusions (no hidden variables).

On an aggregate scale it doesn't make sense to talk about a system based on "saving". You can't eat money in retirement.

So retirees are always extracting some fraction of the productive output of current labor. This fraction can go up or down depending on the economic growth rate and expectation of standard of living of retirees.

I'm with you up until the left has never been "for the people", like wat?

In this case property tax (the non-land component of it) only exacerbates the problem though.

You're projecting our experience of time onto what is a timeless mathematical essence. The idea that OP is referring to is that the universe "exists" simply because it is internally consistent.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit... for a detailed analysis of this effect

It sounds like you are advocating something like IP mercantilism which is even worse than the original mercantilism considering that IP is not a zero-sum commodity. It should be distributed as widely as possible.

It's really not. SF public policy can barely be counted as liberal and seeing people on HN calling it "leftist" is maddening.

SF and California at large is run by liberal Democrats, but that's a far cry from actual leftism.

Finance and markets are not the same thing though.

It drives me crazy seeing people claim to "just" prefer living in the car-oriented suburbs when

1) that lifestyle is vastly subsidized by economic activity generated in the cities

2) the biggest reason cities are unpleasant is (surprise) the high density of car traffic and noise!

The mass distribution of personal cars is going to go down as the greatest mistake in societal development.

Modern capitalists are way too efficient at moving capital via financialization for that to work in practice.

This is an inevitable consequence of the commodification of housing.

What you're describing sounds like the experience in any developing country. You haven't given any evidence that it's due to socialism. (Though comparing to my experiences in developing capitalist countries I would say Cuba has a very different economic 'feeling' to it, which I would argue is superior for the level of material development.)

> Other parts of latin america and caribbean might be poor but Cuba could have done so much better. You can tell they are a strong-willed industrious people who work hard.

Wait so if they had capitalism the Cuban economy would be better than other poor Latin American economies because they work harder? At least you're not making the classic disingenuous comparison between the economic development of imperialist superpowers and socialist nations that started off poor...

The fact that you are being downvoted for this is such a perfect proof of what you're saying, ironically.