visualradio

> But let’s assume there is indeed enough time, and that we suddenly get serious about planning. What should we do?

In the United States public planning is typically limited to figuring out how to prop up the private financial system for one more quarter. In the U.S. most money is created through real estate mortgages. Although people like to talk about gold, crypto, consumers, producers, and government spending the mainstream financial system in charge of allocating the resources is really a mortgage based system.

Suppose someone has an estate with buildings and structures with replacement cost of $200,000. A broker says the estate has a comparable sales price of $600,000. In a loose money system we just trust the banks and brokers to do all of the planning, publicly guarantee mortgages at the reported $600,000, and have federal reserve buy assets to prop up prices at whatever number private finance has fixed upon.

In a slightly tighter system, we might cap real estate loan guarantees at 200% of replacement cost of non-land fixed capital. So if property has buildings and fixtures worth $200,000 public loan guarantees max out at $400,000 even if broker says property is worth $600,000. In order to write up price to $600,000 the owner would need to install $100,000 more in fixed capital, the effect of which is to redirect a larger share of the money created through mortgages to other sectors of economy.

How to use this to promote green energy investment?

Suppose instead of a replacement cost cap of 200% there was a replacement cost cap of 150% for normal capital and 250% for green capital. Then in order to take out a property loan for $600,000 the owner would have to install at least $400,000 of normal capital (structures, fixtures, equipment) or at least $240,000 of green capital (solar panels, wind turbines, lifted mass storage systems), regardless of how high the land values in the location had been written up.

In our current system the incentive of brokers is really just to write up asset prices as high as possible until the financial system collapses in order to generate some nice asset gains during credit bubbles. We can take advantage of this greed and use it to promote green energy investment by tightening up rules for lending against speculative land values using fixed capital replacement cost caps, which are slightly looser for fixed capital which is green.

First we had gold, and the Spanish looted the New World to acquire it and found themselves no richer. Then we had real estate mortgages and used deeds to estates instead of gold, and the speculators wrote up intangible asset prices as high as possible to get more money from central banks. Then we had digital gold, and no one used it because money is credit and no one wanted to pay excessive interest to internet goldbugs.

Ideally we would recognize that issuing money is a collective problem and attempt to fix our public money system, which is based on real estate mortgages.

We can fix it by recognizing that when a home has a fixed capital replacement cost of $150,000 and broker has written the comparable sales price up to $400,000 that it is not necessary to publicly guarantee the mortgages at the comparable sales price of $400,000 only the $150,000. Or to at least cap the public mortgage guarantees at double the replacement cost ($300,000) whenever the comparable sales price ($400,000) is greater.

It perhaps goes against libertarian sensibilities to claim that if the labor and material cost of the replacing all of the structures, fixtures, equipment, appliances conveyed with an estate is $150,000 and the comparable sales prices of $400,000 that the estate has 'intrinsic value' of $150,000 rather than just subjective value of $400,000. But with federally backed mortgages the $400,000 is not a long run competitive market value, it is a number which a specific set of brokers and banks have fixed upon which the central bank then commits to backing regardless of how they pick it.

Requiring loans which expand legal tender to be issued on at least half security of the replacement cost of non-obsolete fixed capital would be a reasonable short term reform to stabilize the public money system in case private crypto money doesn't work out.

"Stable money" isn't an exact policy. But in U.S. most money is created through real estate mortgages, so stable money could mean credit guidance, and countries such as China have used window guidance to avoid excessive real estate bubbles in order to maintain an industrial base.

Ideally federally backed mortgages would be issued on security of the minimum replacement cost of fixed capital rather than on comparable sales price. If it costs $150,000 in labor and materials to replace a small house and fixtures with a new home of equal utility, but comparable sales price is appraised at $400,000, creating money through federally backed mortgages to sustain the valuation does not really create more money for private sector innovation, it creates asset gains for passive investors which are making money without innovating.

Requiring federally backed mortgages and equity loans to be issued on at least half security of fixed capital whenever the comparable sales price exceeds 200% of the replacement cost would not starve the private sector of money, it would simply encourage investors not to throw away the industrial base economy the innovation economy was built on, or to at least fudge asset valuations higher by writing up the labor replacement cost rather than the intangible benefits so wages tracked productivity gains more closely.

> Each normal five-to-ten year business cycle in modern US history has ended with higher debt as a percentage of GDP ... This is because at the end of a long-term debt cycle, debt levels get so large relative to the size of the economy that it becomes impossible to deleverage them nominally

The problem is not simply the debt, its also with how we measure GDP. NIPA is broken and counts ground rent, late fees, and interest on loans created for speculation on intangible assets as output rather than overhead.

Generally prior to recessions when real GDP appears to be going up its really already dropping due to malinvestment and over-financialization. For instance during 1980s asset bubble in Japan corporations previously only involved in manufacturing started opening divisions to speculate in real estate and stock market.

The more relevant issue is whether or not it preserves backwards compatibility. It is possible for their compiler to continue to consume existing ANSI C and C99 header files and source code, without requiring the programmer to manually write FFI bindings and wrappers to call regular C functions as is the case in many other high-level languages, and also without adding as many features as C++.

The chicken-and-egg problem is where programmers don't know how the C API works well enough to provide function-specific type annotation or library-specific configuration settings, but want to try calling the API anyway because they are following a tutorial written in C or C++. In this situation if there is no "dumb" binding mode builtin to the language the programmer is likely to abandon the language and go back to writing C or C++ until they get the IO working and something displayed on screen.

For programmers which need to consume C APIs ideally the tool is the standard compiler. Eeverything gets handled at compile time without the need for community-maintained cache of bindings. New language designers start with a C compiler which handles header files, then extend compiler to also parse NewLang files. The in-memory representation is loaded from both source types, without throwing away the C functionality. In NewLang there is some standard namespace and calling convention.

    @importc "stdio.h"
    num : I32 : 123456789
    fd : c:int : c:open(c:"file.txt", c:O_RDONLY)
    :: c:print("file:%d  number:%d\n", fd, num)

But nothing more, everything else is handled by compiler.

If a project requires an open API like OpenGL, SDL, Vulkan which is documented and defined using ANSI C or C99 language constructs, then some amount of C is required regardless of the merits of the language. With high level language with large community maybe someone writes and maintains wrapper, library, or FFI binding for you but this relies on economy of scale and out-sourcing work. If a programmer doesn't understand a C API then writing a binding to a function they don't understand in order to test it is a point of friction which encourages returning to plain C. Ideally more of the "Better C" languages would retain ability to parse and compile vanilla C header files without manual binding. Zig attempts this but reduces the cognitive simplicity of the language by using structs as namespaces for holding local function definitions rather than as "plain old data".

Before substantially modifying the language, make sure your parser can still load vanilla C header files with no new features.

This way if you accidentally create a new language, programmers will still be able to load existing C header files without having to manually write and maintain FFI bindings.

Skimming the book there are number of issues which stand out.

With regards to 'selling the schools', in many places the charter school money just goes to tax exempt private landlords the charter school is leasing the building from without any substantial increase in benefits for students.

The section on taxes ignores state and local property tax and portfolio effect caused by deductions and expenses in federal income tax.

The chapter on money seems bad. Money is credit not a commodity. The simplest way to create money is through an equity loan not issuing gold certificates for gold bars. When someone wishes to take out a loan in 1M new-dollars on security of an estate worth 1M USD, the new dollars are a new unit of currency initially issued at a 1:1 ratio to USD which then floats.

The U.S. colonies did not originally have any gold. Issuing public money on security of estates allowed the colonies to provide a medium exchange for farmers without precious metals, raise revenue from interest payments without taxes, and economically develop despite mercantilist policies by Great Britain. During revolutionary war and war of 1812 the U.S. printed money and treasury notes to pay for existentially necessary expenses because taking out large loans in external currency which could not be paid off within 20 years or inflated was considered unethical to future generations.

Gold standard has caused lots of problems historically. Just going back to gold standard and depending upon private banks for money is not really solution. If a country does not have gold and residents are not allowed to domestically provide money as a public utility, on ideological grounds that anything 'public' is bad, this could prevent a country from developing if foreign lenders decide they can gain more through usury than by financing productive development, and could also prevent a country from financing defensive war during invasion.

If there are 5 wells and an owner of 1 well poisons 4 of them, they are able to charge more for the remaining clean water, and possibly acquire money for a commodity which was previously available for free, by increasing scarcity. In a private government concerned only with maximization of income of its owners or investors such pathological outcomes are possible. In the U.S. idea of a republic it is usually thought there should be a public government concerned with the maximization of happiness of residents, something which many libertarians or anarcho-capitalists do not agree with.

If an oil pipeline breaks and destroys available sources of potable water, it may increase price * quantity for companies selling bottled water, but the price increase is due to increased rent paid for access to clean water, due to an increase in scarcity caused by environmental degradation.

Additionally NIPA consider interest payments on debt financed speculative asset purchases and late fees paid to banks to be output. And in talks with local governments, property investors regularly claim that any project which might increase speculative land prices creates value when asking for tax abatements.

The problem with libertarianism is the subjective theory of value, the idea that everything is worth what the purchaser will pay. Under this framework any action which boosts the relative exchange price of an asset can be claimed to create value, even if the action is purely destructive. A gain in relative exchange price can be achieved without engaging in production merely by increasing scarcity of alternatives. In other words by increasing the marginal unhappiness felt by dispossession of an asset, by destroying the productivity of the commons and quantity of freely available alternatives, without increasing happiness for anyone. If a government creates money to purchase assets and services at subjective prices it could be promoting unhappiness rather than happiness. At least at the interface between the public sector and private sector (taxes, spending, public loans & grants) some other ideas are needed.

In the U.S. politicians were more concerned with the opposite, that low property taxes would be more likely to cause loss of population and emigration than high property taxes. At the time of the revolution the U.S. colonies were relying on revenue from land tax, property tax, property income tax, and public banking rather than sales tax and were rapidly growing in population due to immigration from European countries where most of the large landholders were exempt from property taxes. Early America had large quantities of land and few workers relative to Europe. In order to industrialize Franklin and founders associated with Democratic-Republican party thought it was first necessary to increase population and maximize rural agricultural productivity, which from reading the French economists they thought would be stimulated by some form of direct tax and hindered by indirect tax.

A move towards making sales taxes less transparent in the United States is unlikely, because many U.S. founders associated with the Democratic-Republican party such as James Madison were influenced by the French Physiocratic school economics, which considered broad-based sales taxes to be a quite harmful method of taxation that should never be relied on as a permanent source of revenue.

This opinion is most clearly expressed by Joel Barlow in "Letters Addressed to the Yeomanry of the United States: Showing the Necessity of Confining the Public Revenue to a Fixed Proportion of the Net Produce of the Land; and the Bad Policy and Injustice of Every Species of Indirect Taxation and Commercial Regulation" (1791).

The federal government has the authority to appoint federal assessors to local property tax districts, to generate valuations for a national property taxation, and then share these updated valuations with state and local governments, which may then independently decide to use the same valuations for purposes of state and local taxation. It did so in order to collect the 1798 national property tax under John Adams and the three 1813-1816 national property taxes under James Madison.

The federal government also has the ability to regulate state and local taxes using the interstate commerce clause. After the provision in the Articles of Confederation limiting the federal government to collecting direct taxes in proportion to state land values was abandoned, the supporters of direct taxation influenced by the French Physiocrats lobbied for the interstate commerce clause in order to ban state and local governments from collecting excise and sales taxes on goods sold across state lines, so that state and local governments would be forced to rely more heavily on property tax.

Research in the U.S. has tended towards applications due to promotion of agricultural productivity research and agricultural extension services by various U.S. founders in the 1700s and due to the land-grant university system established in the 1800s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university

> you could instead, as a wild supposition, make all representatives live within 20 miles of the plant to align incentives

Isn't it possible this would increase the chance they had financial ties to the nuclear industry? My initial thought was that if you appointed environmental scientists to monitor emissions in areas without nuclear plants, they could also check the work of other assessors in areas with nuclear plants, to make sure their colleagues were honest, when attending board meetings.

So you would get bright people which were otherwise uninvolved to check the work and listen to what was being discussed.

Another option which would not rely on local election, would be to have Congress appoint 50 environmental assessors, one from each state, which were required to be permanent residents of each state they were appointed to represent, rather than employees of a national office. The assessors would then meet once per year to form a national oversight board.

> As an educated voter, I would not want to vote for my nuclear inspector

The chief job of local environmental assessors would likely be gathering and aggregate local data sources to monitor and track a wide variety of emissions, including non-radioactive emissions in areas with no nuclear industry.

> I have zero ability to evaluate their qualifications, or job performance

The feedback signal to watch would be whether newspapers and activists say they are compromised by financial ties to local industries, which can be assisted by financial disclosure forms.

> This is why representative democracies exist

Another option which relied more on Congress would be to have the House & Senate appoint one independent environmental assessor from each state, which were required to be permanent residents of each state, to attend an annual meeting once per year, to form an independent board of oversight. The assessors would have to be permanent residents of the state they were appointed to represent and submit financial disclosure forms.

> How do you set up a genuinely independent regulator that has strong enough teeth, one that cannot be leaned on by industry heavyweights lobbying the government?

Directly elected local environmental assessors, which are required to attend annual meetings at the state and federal level?

The auditors which make up the regulatory panel would then be directly elected by residents throughout the country and would inspect the work of their colleagues.

Solve the waste storage and disposal problem first, then treat it as an emissions problem, and ensure the nuclear industry is investing in technologies which continually recycling or minimizing the total mass of high level waste it is producing in exchange for disposal and storage services.