Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

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Wealth taxes are a bad idea because they target everyone with wealth, regardless of the actual views they hold, regardless of the degree to which they have personally contributed to the collapse we are facing.

The real inequality we have today is being perpetuated by outdated regulations, primarily from the 1930s. It's also being perpetuated by people that invest in Warren Buffet-style "value" stocks, which extract actual rents from people, while delivering no technological improvements. Housing is 80% of the inequality problem, and if we are going to fix that, we have to stop making it illegal to build enough homes for people that need them. And to do it cheaply enough, we have to turn to automated custom home manufacturing, which means overcoming the objections of labor unions.

For example, I just saw this in the LA Times - "Labor unions, environmentalists are biggest opponents of Gov. Brown’s affordable housing plan":

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-labor-enviro-hou...

NB: I think we need new, distributed structures to replace labor unions, because the goal they serve is an important one. The existing ones concentrate power at the top, and have become just another corrupt institution.

> regardless of the actual views they hold

Are you really suggesting that taxing someone based on their views is a good idea.

Of course not. I'm merely saying that many people that support the wealth tax are looking at it from the perspective of getting back at the boomers. They are onto something, insofar as that generation did support policies that really did effect a huge wealth transfer that benefitted the boomers, at the expense of basically everyone else.

The thing I'm trying to call out is that they might not want to wipe out GenX-ers like me, who invested their personal savings into TSLA, and are working to use the wealth to actually help people rather than to buy fancy clothes, condos and yachts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZJNe7YtE

(Something to understand here is Weinstein's argument about WWII, embedded growth obligations and institutional decline...)

> we have to stop making it illegal to build enough homes for people that need them

There's already enough homes (in the USA, at least) to house all the homeless people in the country. Unfortunately, giving homes away wouldn't be profitable, and profit is all that seems to matter.

What about the fact that those homes are not equally distributed geographically? There are reasons people prefer to live near their families, workplaces, places with good weather, etc.

without profit as incentive, no homes would've been build. Or maybe they would've been, North Korea style.

Sounds like you agree that there's a problem with a system the prioritizes profit over everything else :)

Sounds like you didn't understand my comment

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