Hawaii governor vows to block land grabs as fire-ravaged Maui rebuilds
npr.org
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But this comes with catch-22 for said rich people. They don't want to pay the poor working class they employ so they can't actually afford to live at these places and all forms of service suffer. You see this in the big expensive cities that the government and civil workers have typically have long commutes to cheaper places as their salaries are typically capped. This becomes very problematic on islands where the the amount of habitable land is low and the demand high.
Children have the right to a K-12 education. Do you consider the entire public school system to purely be slaves?
If I go to an emergency room, I have the right to life-saving treatments even if I can't pay. Are the doctors slaves?
No, of course not. They all get paid. They're all free to quit their jobs at any time.
Let's steelman GP's argument, which obviously was hyperbolic. But it's true that positive rights (or entitlements) are always paid for by the labor of others. K-12 public schools are generally majority paid for by local property taxes, and we all know what happens if you stop paying property taxes.
The average American worker already pays close to quarter of their earnings in labor-related taxes[0], which doesn't include property tax, sales tax, or any other kind of tax that people pay. I think we can safely estimate that at least a third of everyone's labor is already spoken for by various layers of government; this lines up with the pre-Covid US government expenditure as a percent of GDP, which was around ~35%[1].
Of course, all of that spending was decided by a democratically-elected government and people more or less buy in to the idea that it is for the common good of the country. But as that spending increases monotonically over time, and as people share fewer things in common with each other (I mean, try putting a 22-year-old college graduate working at a nonprofit in Brooklyn and a 22-year-old journeyman electrician in Iowa City in the same room), it gets harder and harder to believe in that common good, and you start to wonder why a third of your productive output goes to things you had no direct choice over, and why the people who make those decisions get richer and richer. Half of the top ten richest counties in the country[2] are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Does that make you feel good?
And guess what happens if you try to keep more of your productive output? You go to jail. That's what people mean by "slavery". Or at any rate, this is my attempt at steelmanning that argument.
[0]: https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-united-stat...
[1]: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
A rising tide lifts all boats, and that is what has borne out by historical fact for capitalism. The easiest way to see how it benefits everyone, even the poorest, is to look at the median person's living standards in places that don't have "capitalism" (which in this context is shorthand for rule of law, strong private property rights, and a market economy).
> a few thousand people hoard all the resources
The mega-ultra-rich (the top richest few thousand people in the world, like you said) aren't piling vaults with gold, Scrooge McDuck style. Their wealth is the productive assets they own, almost always companies that generate value for consumers.
Besides, the net worth of all American billionaires combined is about four and a half trillion dollars[0]. Even if you could magically confiscate all of that "money" at that same valuation (which you can't, since you cannot liquidate a stock and expect it to fetch the same price) and redistribute it to everyone, that's a whopping bonus of $13.5k to every man, woman, and child in this country. Do you seriously imagine everyone can stop working and live happy lives with that money?
Put another way, $4.5T is not even five years of Social Security. What happens next?
> we have to keep working
I'm not really sure what you think the alternative is. As pg said, wealth is what people want[1], whether that's an AC unit to keep yourself cool if you live in a hot place, or heating oil to keep yourself warm if you live in a cool place, or a flight to Paris for a vacation, or filet mignon, or rice and beans, or a can of Coke, or a glass of wine. Every single one of those things takes labor to produce. If all rich people ceased to exist, it will not change the fact that you cannot wave a magic wand and put food on your table.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291685/us-combined-valu...
To a point and then not, which is why capitalism in tbe narrow sense was rejected generally in the early-mid-20th century in favor of the modern mixed econony, which, like strict capitalism before it, is almost certainly not the end of the road on the advancement of economic systems.
This also misses that it does so by FORCING said highest boats to pay the state/federal taxes in which are used to ensure those with sinking boats don't turn into pirates to stay alive.
>The mega-ultra-rich (the top richest few thousand people in the world, like you said) aren't piling vaults with gold, Scrooge McDuck style. Their wealth is the productive assets they own, almost always companies that generate value for consumers.
Because we incentive investment. If we did not there would be plenty of ultra mega rich sitting on piles of gold pretending they were dragons.
Every damned discussion I see about this tries to pain everything in a binary when it's a far more complicated topic. The wealthy are far better off putting some sizeable portion of their wealth to ensure society works because it creates a feedback cycle where both their wealth, and the gross wealth of the society increases, and the society is one that is generally safer to take part in.
> Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
I understand wanting to protect Hawaii's heritage, etc. but landowners should be free to sell the property to whosoever they deem fit, at whatever price.
Read about the recent Chilean constitution reform for what happens when people try to write a constitution based on things that would be nice to have, without seriously considering all of the nth-degree complexities that would result if those nice things were to actually be put into reality with the might of the state.
This, too, is a policy decision, and fixing this one is both easier and would result in a more sustainable long-term wealth growth, compared to the state forcing the direction of the "surplus wealth" of economic endeavors.
[0]: https://cdn.freedominthe50states.org/download/2021/onesheet/...
[1]: https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2022/04/uhero-hawai...
There is a school of thought that says the latter is not really valid, since it may (or eventually will) be that some negative rights be violated to make it happen.
For the state to enforce a citizen's philanthropic right to some stuff, the have to dispossess someone else of it - after all, the state can't produce anything, it can only expropriate what's been produced.
One can only dream of a time and place where government is only funded by a strict land-value tax, though...
Likewise, in a contract republic (or a charter city) individuals will agree to a neutral third party to arbitrate between them if they ever have a disagreement. This can be anyone from a spiritual authority they both respect, an authority in their industry, or a private court that's built a reputation for fairness, promising to pay the private court a percentage of any arbitration settlement they bring before it.
And if the court as much as makes one unfair ruling, it will drive away new business from parties who want a neutral third party. In a contract republic, individuals will be free to have their case judged by any judge, as long as both parties agree beforehand.
Opening the justice market will make sure crime gets punished, expedite justice, and reduce its cost.
If, instead of studying libertarian theory, you study history deeply, you’ll find that there is no magical distinction between private actors and government, and that when you rely on non-governmental actors to provide things like defense without a more powerful government to constrain them, that positions allows them to become a government.
> And if the court as much as makes one unfair ruling, it will drive away new business from parties who want a neutral third party.
No one wants a neutral third party, everyone wants someone that is biased towards them but which the opposing party can be conned into believing is not.
Neutral is just what you would get, were such a market viable, when both sides happen to have equal success. (Which outside of naive assumptions about perfect information, is unlikely to be normal in practice.)
(I too can make bald, sweeping statements without any justification or thought to reality, based purely on my gut feeling and predisposed ideology).
If there's no government-enforced zoning restriction on new buildings (which are really monopolies on land use granted to existing landlords), new buildings will flood the market once you jack up prices.
A true monopoly can only survive by using government regulation to enforce its position - if not for senseless zoning regulation (government-granted land use monopolies granted to the middle-class in return for votes), housing wouldn't be an issue in the US.
So, it's not a capitalism/free market problem, dislocations in market are caused by government meddling.
If you live in binary land, yea... to bad we live in the real world where things are a lot more complicated.
Lets say we lived on an island that had the water resources for 1000 residences. Cool, now we've set limits on the total number of people we can support without things falling apart or costs massively increasing. In rational world the democratic representation sets up a government and creates a set of rules zoning this. In your backwards broken shithole, the first developer with a billion dollars comes in and builds 10,000 houses and everyone is fucked.
These things are very hard to balance. And you're correct, the 'average' voter which tends to correlate with homeowner will vote in their best interest of increasing home prices once they own one. When you strip that away you typically get massive developers wanting to create as many houses as possible, which may or may not work depending on the limitations of the land this occurs on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy
> Representative democracy, also known as indirect democracy, is a type of democracy where elected people represent a group of people, in contrast to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies function as some type of representative democracy.
This is often repeated by the media, but no, emergency powers aren't a magic card you can pull out to ignore the law. Emergency powers don't supersede the Constitution.
The government preventing the sale of a property without any compensation would be very clearly considered a "taking". For example, even in cases of Eminent Domain the government still has to compensate you for the fair value of your property.
They might want to move somewhere else to be with family, or buy a house in a place with better fire protections.
If you don't allow them to sell, you're basically turning in them into land bound surfs, they can't do what they choose with their own property
Fair market value is what a willing buyer and seller agree on. Nothing more, nothing less. Who are you, me, or any other disinterested party to decide if, when, and for how much someone sells their land for?
In reality shit typically gets a lot more complicated when you have one party that has just experienced a disaster and may have lost everything, including their loved ones. And another party with lots of money and large numbers of paid individuals enacting a coordinated plan.
The same thing applies here.
"forced to sell", how exactly?
No, nobody put a gun to their head. But this is a little black and white, no?
If the state of Hawaii wants to do something to help, they should help the victims by giving them better alternatives. Stripping away their options is not that.
There are plenty of options that don't leave the impacted victims worse off. The state might provide emergency financing for individuals so they don't want to sell. The state might Place competitive bids for land that would be sold to other parties.