Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

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PaulDavisThe1st

Can I assume that you're comfortable being equated with whatever your parents did during their younger years?

Look, radical leftist politics in SF (or anywhere else) would be about:

  1. corporate taxation
  2. minimum wage at $21/hr or above
  3. limiting investment in residential real estate
  4. major investment in public transit
  5. limiting the use of private motor vehicle transportation
  6. reducing the role of national/international brands in city-wide retail
  7. progressive (i.e. marginal) property taxation
  8. pushing CA on a number of issues, such as non-local tax base for education

The problem is that these policies, unlike the ones dealing with issues like homelessness, would conflict with the desires of the wealth & power classes, and thus cannot be enacted. So you're left with "radical" politics basically being about how the city deals with its poorest, most needy residents, without any fundamental change in the wealth & power relationships that would actually be genuinely radical.

I’m confused—you’re claiming the above are radical leftist policies? They seem like (mostly bad) moderate left policies to me.

Here are things I think are radical, and my gauge for that is asking if it could reasonably appear on a BLM demands list. Pushes to defund police, stop enforcing laws (or as Chesa did, enforce weakened versions for fear it would result in “dangerous” deportations) or direct repeat criminals to programs that allow them to avoid jail/records, giving homeless cash and a place to do drugs “safely”. Not to mention the new ask for $5M per black resident for reparations, with some claiming it doesn’t go near far enough.

The idea that these problems are a result of high cost of living and NIMBYism are absurd. When progressive policies fail, the left still find ways to blame it on “the rich”. Marxism 101.

Those were all hallmark left wing policies up to maybe the early 2000s but nowadays the policy programme is different. When was the last time you heard leftists talk about tax? It's like something from another time, these days it's all about other policies like racial/sexual divisions, control over media and education, "reparations" and so on.

> When was the last time you heard leftists talk about tax?

I don't live in SF, or the Bay Area or CA, so maybe the leftists you're referring to are people I don't hear much at all. But the leftists I do hear (e.g. Jacobin magazine) talk about taxes all the time. I heard Sanders talk about taxes while Schultz was in front of Congress last week.

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