/s

Think clearly, correctly and grounded in reality.

In less...anatomical...inspiration, there's a guy in Chicago who took this idea straight to the fine art phase:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/11/pothole-...

Potholes have different causes. For example if there is a slow water leak that's compromised the road sub base that needs to get fixed first or you're just throwing money in a hole.

I don't think corruption is a left/right axis like that.

And I don't know, maybe it's early days, but Mamdani seems less corrupt than his predecessors.

I find it very hard to fault that person coming to the meeting wanting their street fixed early. What real sin are they committing except noticing that there’s a piece of infrastructure that they depend on that’s messed up? The city does not get a pass just because it claims to be busy elsewhere.

If I believed that the city schedule was optimal in every way, I could be convinced that nothing should change as a result of that person‘s complaints, but I don’t believe that. And even if I did, that person is providing a valuable service in the case that the city made a mistake somewhere. They do not know that the schedule is optimal (if it even is). They know their street is messed up.

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-s...

BTW Swiss public spending is lower (32 per cent), and Swiss sidewalks and roads are uniformly nice. At the same time, Germany is at 48 per cent and it has a big problem with aging infrastructure, railways, bridges etc. Swiss rail authority regularly refuses delayed German trains at the border in order not to cause chaos in the reliable Swiss railway network. Given the 32 vs. 48 per cent of public spending, you would expect it to be the other way round, but it isn't. The mapping between the volume of public spending and quality of public services is not that simple.

Maybe the problem in the US is that too much money gets siphoned away by various legal or illegal means. Famously, whenever places like California or NYC try to build something like a new subway line or a new high-speed rail, their project budgets balloon into absolutely insane volumes, much higher than comparable projects in France, Italy or Japan, and the main reason is that various special interests need to be satisfied, from the construction unions to various NIMBYs.

With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.

I was kinda shocked, when working in South Africa, to find that the roads and sidewalks there were often in much better shape than ones I'd seen in the US. And from the other side, the only place I've ever seen roads as patched and potholed as ones in US cities was in rural Russia.

A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide jobs, rather than spend their wealth on luxuries for themselves. In this way, we have an economy focused more on the needs and wants of regular people, and less on producing what wealthy people want.

Can you spot a flaw in that line of reasoning?

Well, in a purely capitalist economy, the answer would be property rights, competition, and liability. For example, a road would be owned by someone, and you could sue that someone for damages if the road damaged your car. A road owner could discharge liability risk by purchacing insurance, and insurance underwriters could require some minimum standard of maintenance from owners in exchange.

> You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...

The whole point of the article that spawned these discussions is that society has already delegated the responsibility for fixing potholes to the government, and the government is doing a crappy enough job of fixing potholes that "art activists" need to make potholes into public art projects to get the government to actually do its job.

If you say so, but I'm yet to meet such an individual. Anytime someone talks libertarianism, it's some kind of weird Randian objectivism, that is still somehow socially conservative, and they align themselves with the GOP more often than not.

I would consider myself pretty liberal (as in, pro-liberty). I just believe that to experience true freedom, equality is necessary. It's not enough to have the freedom to do X or Y, you also need to have the means to. Why should some people be freer than others just because they happened to be well-born?

> the system was more capitalist, it would get fixed faster and better.

The system is getting more capitalist. That's why we're having more and more potholes. After decades of neoliberal austerity and deregulation, there ain't any money left to fix shit.

What a government employee used to do in an hour of minimum wage now requires 10 government contractors who charge ludicrous sums for useless prestations, and don't even end up delivering because they've successfully lobbied themselves out of liability! You know, in the name of efficiency, since as we all know the government can't do anything by itself, and the private sector is that much more efficient.

> I think most people would be open to increasing cash government salaries if the rest of the job also matched the broader economy - at-will employment, no public sector unions, etc. You trade some of your cash compensation in the government for the cushy benefits, sub-40 hour work week and lots of time off, and the near impossibility of being fired especially once you've been there for a few decades.

I would argue that the rest of the economy should follow the standards of public servants, rather than degrade their working conditions to match this terrible job market.

> The golden age of the West happened due to a war-time manufacturing boom that would put the industrial revolution to shame.

That's a partial myth, a manufacturing boom alone is meaningless if the generated wealth isn't redistributed. Markets have never been this healthy, yet regular people aren't getting any richer.

Same thing for the industrial revolution. It didn't amount to much for the general population until the big labor movements and the invention of unions.

> If you're making a ton of money and your marginal tax rate is 90%, what incentive do you have to work another ten hours a week or open another factor or release a new product if you're only keeping 10% of what you earn?

Look, it worked in the 50s. I am not interested in the classic economist's argument of "it works in practice, but does it work in theory?". You can probably find books written by people much better informed than I am. For instance, do you know about Thomas Piketty?

I think enshittification, cost externalization, and rent-seeking behavior cancel this out, muddying the connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. For example, we needed cap-and-trade to internalize the costs of acid rain back onto power plants.

>These claims are demonstrably false. Paper assets provide no tangible benefits.

I think my rhetorical bait worked: you seem to agree with incentivizing luxury spending on real goods and services (instead of incentivizing capital gains)? Adam Smith argues to take that vanity and drive it towards public recognition. For example, many universities put the names of rich donors on the opulent buildings they donate to build. That's good! (My college's music building was amazing!)

>In other words, doesn't that policy incentivize wealthy people to consume less and, therefore, claim a reduced share of economic benefits? Consequently, doesn't an increased share of economic benefits go to "regular people"?

I thought trade doesn't make a zero-sum game? Money supply is a zero-sum game (I think), and I want money sinks to spread the money. We want them to spend their stored money to generate more tangible wealth for all. Luxury goods often push the limits to what can be done, advancing technology and generating wealth while also depleting their money stores. But while investments and venture capital might also advance technology and generate wealth, they continue to concentrate the money supply to the rich. Not good!

Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments (share buyback is very often a good tell), then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.

> Let me try and repeat it back. Resource allocation is a zero-sum game within any given year, resource production increases yearly as technology increases, technology increases more as capital increases, so a low capital gains tax will increase resource production more than a high capital gains tax.

Actually, this line of reasoning is tangential to the thrust of my argument. Let’s get to it now:

> If I got that right, here's my best shot at a contradiction. If resource allocation is a zero-sum game, money (liquid assets) determines resource allocation, …

Okay, here’s what I think you’re missing. Money does not determine resource allocation. But spending money does! Only by spending money do you get to consume goods and services. Therefore, by getting wealthy people not to spend but to invest almost all of their wealth, we get them to give up their claim on where today’s resources are allocated. They control wealth but not resource allocations.

> … and low capital gains tax further concentrates money to the wealthy, …

I believe that this claim is more or less true.

> … then the wealthy gain a greater share of resource allocation next year.

But this claim does not follow. Wealthy people gain a greater share of the wealth allocation next year, but they do not spend that wealth, nor the new wealth they gain each year. They spend only a tiny fraction of it – and invest the rest. Thus, most of this “extra” wealth that wealthy people gain is invested, with resource allocations from that wealth to be determined by spending across the population in general, not by the wealthy who invested it.

> I claim that if the wealthy were to put their money in luxuries (things that don't give capital gains), they would control more allocation in a given year, but then they would decrease their share of resource allocation the next year. I also claim that resource production would increase just fine, as technology initially benefiting luxury production expands toward general production.

Let’s say that the wealthiest 1% of people control half of all wealth. If we forced them to spend that wealth, much of the economy’s resources would be redirected to provide goods and services to the top 1% of people. For a very long time, the remaining 99% of people, especially the lower 80%, would find it very hard to purchase goods and services, for their spending would be dwarfed. Resource production would increase, but I doubt it would be “just fine.” Factories producing mega-yachts, doctors providing exotic cosmetic surgeries, and master chefs preparing one-of-a-kind meals with luxury ingredients such as hand-massaged beef fed grasses from the richest soils on Earth… These are not easily adapted to produce things that regular people need.

By getting those wealthy people to invest their wealth instead, we get them to give up their ability to dictate where today’s resources go. In exchange, they (as a group) get the promise of earning more wealth tomorrow from their investments.

I agree, however, that concentration of wealth is a problem for society. When a small number of people can, in effect, buy the government with pocket change, that’s not good. But a low tax rate on capital gains is only one contributing factor to the concentration-of-wealth problem.

Thanks for chatting.