Are you not aware of the concept of externalities? How do you, for example, explain the fact that leaded gasoline was only replaced with non-leaded gasoline when "meddling" made it illegal?
The official policy position is that the free market won't gamble enough if left alone and that it needs to be forced away from conservative plays. We must admit that this is, potentially, a contributing factor to the lack of responsible long term thinking in markets that are influenced by money (hedging in case there are aspects of life that aren't influenced by low interest rates, if someone spots any let me know).
Plus printing money and handing it out to rich people is outrageous. I'm confused at how anyone is can pretend that is a good idea. You didn't say that, I'm just throwing it out there Carthago delenda est style)
That's a very profound statement, are you kidding me?
The irony is that you're falling victim to exactly this phenomenon: I claim that meddling in one form is bad and you pull out a knee-jerk argument with a buzzword (externalities) that injects a misinterpretation of the logic in the argument. When you are predisposed to meddle, you put up barriers to understanding my argument.
Anyways, my point is exactly that central banking makes blindness to externalities worse.
Freon would be a much more interesting example as it hurts societies in the long-term and not individuals in the short.
Better way is to tax consumption, but that has never been popular in US.
Yes we complain a lot and criticize the government and don’t fully trust our polarized politicians, but a real “low trust” society is a far cry from what we have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...
1. More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-bide...
2. US tax system is not voluntary, but extremely coercive - the IRS is legendary in its blood-houndness and the US is probably the only country in the world that taxes non-resident citizens.
3. Abortion-Rights Protest Targets Homes of Kavanaugh, Roberts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-08/abortion-...
I am not sure if the US could already be classified as a low-trust society (probably not yet), but a strong negative trend is definitely present.
> More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll
Political polling is seen by some as more of a driver of opinion than an extraction of one.
I downvoted because the apparent argument ("the US has these imperfections, thus it follows that it ranks low among countries") is a specific incarnation of the enumeration fallacy that is both obvious and frequently employed. If this isn't what the parent intended to communicate, then he can take my downvote as a cue to be clearer in the future. My downvotes are intended as (albeit very low-resolution) constructive criticism, not ill-will or petty disagreement.
Moreover:
> [The US's classification as a high-trust society] might have been true 10 years ago, but now (just from the wiki examples): ...
This seems to unambiguously argue that the US is not a high-trust society. With the additional context of your quote "not sure if the US could be classified as a low trust society...", it's possible that the parent is contradicting himself or that he's arguing that the US is certainly not high-trust, but middling or lower. Thus the parent is either unclear (contradiction) or he's arguing by enumeration. Even if there is some alternative interpretation, this very debate suffices to prove unclarity.
So, I made this statement based on low national self-esteem. Later on I compared in my head current US with places such as Lebanon and Venezuela and realised that it is still doing pretty well, even though the strong downwards trend simply cannot be denied. So yeah.
I'm not sure if this is the parent's intent, but there's a whole lot of sincere "the US is a third world country" sort of argumentation going around, predicated entirely on observations that the US falls short of certain utopian ideals). "The US should continue to improve" doesn't depend on pretense that the US lags the median for a given category, and I strongly suspect that this sort of rhetoric gives way to the sort of fatalism that prevents societies from progressing ("we can't progress, we're stuck in this miserable system, etc").
Fundamentally, poor and middle-class people spend a higher percentage of their annual income on goods and services than rich people do. There just isn't enough stuff that one could ever want to buy (or services to partake in) for rich people to spend the same proportion annually.
The best you'd be able to manage is limiting your consumption taxes to things that only very wealthy people can afford in the first place, like superyachts. But at that point, a) you're not managing to bring in a huge amount of revenue with it, and b) you might as well just raise the higher income tax brackets, or add taxes on wealth over $X amount.
In any case, what the govt doesn't take in taxes, it can just take via inflation.
Wealth confiscation via inflation is great! it doesn't require politicians to justify higher taxes to their constituents (and thus face the wrath of their voters), and it can be implemented by unaccountable and unelected officials at the Fed.
I am the most anti-socialist person I know and even to me, inflation is too cruel of a tax.
This is the same fallacious thinking “libertarians” fall into when they think civil court will solve for most regulations/codes. The burden of proving harm is too high. Probably hundreds of millions were spent proving that leaded gasoline was unsafe. No criminal prosecution could have accomplished that. They simply don’t have the resources.
And who would they have prosecuted anyway? The gasoline companies weren’t actually the ones causing the harm. It was the billions of people driving around burning the stuff.
There’s a reason we end up with laws regulating specific things like this. It’s untenable for the courts to handle otherwise.
But then again I am not really an anarcho-capitalist, but an extremely mild minarchist (imagine Raegan without his naiveness or Thatcher without her inferiority complex). So even this doesn't represent my opinion.
I do however fully support reasonable regulations (consequences for externalities), building infrastructure, universal aid and healthcare programs, etc.
Basically bad decisions like over borrowing, and bad lending, should be punished (not bailed out or you encourage bad decisions). Financial decisions that shift cost to others (externalities like dumping chemicals into a river) should also be punished. At the same time a safety net can be developed (cheap housing, food, or even UBI) to prevent the most devastating individual consequences (especially those you may not even be responsible for). That’s my ideal at least.
Ah…age-old gaslight tactic. Using words like “everything” “all” “any” to encapsulate your opponents argument then using a non-sequitor counter-point (leaded gasoline) to argue a tangent point (a point not relating to interest rates).