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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

Most of the worst aspects of the San Francisco Bay Area long predate the tech industry boom. The NIMBYs that made housing a largely unaffordable luxury, and its inevitable consequence of large-scale homelessness, are precisely the Boomer hippies who turned coat with Reagan and adopted the greed-is-good naked self-interest with a vengeance. They've got theirs, and they couldn't care less if you drop dead.

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Those NIMBYs largely call themselves Progressives now: https://reason.com/2022/08/11/are-san-franciscos-nimbys-fina... There are some articles that call out the political affiliations more directly, but all of the elected officials they're talking about are Progressives.

I'm curious how one goes from Reagan to US Progressive.

Progressivism is a big tent. In the early 20th century it was associated with urban politics of a rather authoritarian streak which promoted things like eugenics and a rigidly segregated labor market, fearing the "unfair" competition of non-white workers.

There's the rhetoric and lip service, and then there is the actual pursuit of a nakedly self-serving agenda. Both can be done simultaneously, e.g. the trust-fund baby Dean Preston's successful efforts to block anything from being built in his district.

They don't

> I'm curious how one goes from Reagan to US Progressive.

The common conservative critique of progressives is progressives say "affirmative action, affordable housing, wealth redistribution are all great, unless it affects me."

Compare standard of living of free market capitalist counties with socialist / communist countries.

There are very good reasons you let markets choose with minimal government interference.

People are going to be greedy in either scenario. But one is government officials having power. The other is regular people.

Have you ever experienced the standard of living in a Scandinavian country?

High taxes, but it's much easier to start and run a business, there are numerous unicorns, housing is affordable, locales of all kinds tend to be more pleasant, especially in cities.

And no one is bankrupted by health care.

Scandinavian countries are ranked among the most economically free (i.e. "capitalist"), despite the high taxes. This was not always the case either, it's just how the 1980s "neoliberal revolution" (which was hugely influential throughout the West and arguably the world at large, well beyond the most commonly mentioned UK and US) played out there.

Dying because insulin is up 1000% in 40 years is the most free capitalism - not what Scandinavia has.

Weird then how no one ever dies of starvation because bread is up 1000%. What market would you think of as freer to entry by new upstarts, the one for bread or for insulin?

Insulin is up that much because of regulations that prevent entry by other competitors

If I was to make a factory to produce insulin. How fast would a “government” agency be after me.

That’s the opposite of a Free market.

The same free market that gave us poisoned meat, is why we have regulations. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle]

It's either bad bad regulations or... capitalism's evil drive for profit over life. So it costs more here where we don't have nationalized healthcare than anywhere else, and we don't live as long. Hmm...

Yeah no. You have:

1. Population growth. I would say this is the largest factor to making housing unaffordable. Unless your claim is that all growth if from local boomers kids (hint: it isn't).

2. Geography. San Francisco is surrounded by quite a bit of water if you haven't noticed. The Bay Area is fenced in with hills. I would argue that geography creates as much of the problem as zoning laws (because if there was easy room to expand people wouldn't be pushing to cancel long term planning and zoning laws and just force through high density housing).

But nice try trying to blame someone on the fact that you want something (to live in a certain area) and think it's fair to trample peoples property rights to get it, make them out to be villians and 'others' worthy of scorn, while ignoring the largest factors (population growth and geography).

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