756 karma · joined August 10, 2017
Disclaimer: I am by no means a bonafide cryptopunk. I have contributed very little code and other meaningful technical work to privacy tech projects.
Financialization of housing has had no negative impact on housing affordability in regions of the US, mostly in the South, that allow housing supply to grow, instead of constricting it with zoning restrictions. On the contrary, basic economic theory would dictate that more advanced financial markets that facilitate greater volumes of investment into housing would be good for housing affordability, by expanding housing supply, and by doing so, increase the number of units available for rent relative to people looking to rent.
Consider which city has the highest rental rates in the world: San Francisco. It has the most stringent restrictions on housing development, and housing use by owners, of any city in North America.
Inhibiting the market is what creates shortages, and housing is no exception.
We want housing to be commodified, and mass-produced by collections of profit-motivated individuals. Consider: construction has kept rent in Chongqing, China to $75 a month.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/world/asia/chongqing-chin...
Taxation is entirely about raising money.
>>It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public services.
What does "releasing real resources" mean, and how does taxation achieve that? And how does a land value tax fail to achieve that?
>>It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public services.
I'm puzzled as to how you conceive of government not needing land, when many government services do in fact need it, or how you perceive other objects of taxation being needed by government in a way that land is not.
>>a home is built on land which people form emotional attachments to
I would argue people should be encouraged to not form an emotional attachment to a house, because the land it occupies is part of a larger society which may come to need it more than the person does.
You may have grown up in a house your grandfather built, but the neighborhood of that house may have changed from a sparsely populated district of a small city, to the densely populated economic core of a major metropolis and regional shipping/trading hub. The land needs to be repurposed to benefit the greatest number of people, and I don't think a perpetual land claim stemming from the principle of first possession should trump that imperative.
I can't think of any other open platform with that large of an audience.
As for its relevance, while it may not host a significant share of the world's population, it enables the userbase to converge on messages very quickly, to coordinate social and political action, which allows them to have an outsized influence on the world. Twitter users don't have to make up the majority of the world's population to be able to give movements the critical mass of supporters they need to succeed.
Private ownership of the latter is both just, because the original owners comes to own it by producing it, and economically advantageous, because ownership incentivizes production, which leads to its supply increasing. With land, there is no moral justification for private ownership, as no private party created the land, and private ownership does not have the economic effect of leading to the supply of it expanding, since land cannot be produced.
The article goes into the advantages of a land value tax over other types of tax, including a property tax:
The big question land value taxes help answer is: How can a government raise funds without distorting choices and possibly leaving people worse off? If you tax income, it provides a disincentive to work. If you tax property, it provides a disincentive to improve the physical buildings on top of the land. Sometimes the tax is intentionally disincentivizing an activity — think carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or so-called “sin taxes” on tobacco. But there are also taxes governments want to levy to pay for valuable services without changing behaviors too much (or at all).
>>The main argument that I see against land value taxes is that land doesn't generate any income by itself, which forces people to pay money in situation where they might not have any income to do so.
Those people should be selling their land. We should not have a scarce natural resource sitting idle or under-utilized. From the article as well:
In small towns, vacant lots contribute to decline — and if there’s no valuable structure on a property, its delinquent landlords likely only pay a nominal property tax. This both lowers tax revenue and hurts neighborhood quality for everyone else.
**
In Allentown, Pennsylvania, the system worked! According to a 2019 Strong Towns article, after the city adopted an LVT (through a split-rate system that still kept some property taxes in place) in 1996, “construction returned to the city: the number of taxable building permits surged past neighboring Bethlehem, market investment returned and capital improvement reappeared in city budgets. ... The losers in this trade were absentee owners of vacant lots, who had to shoulder much more of the burden.”
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) is quoted touting the benefits of the tax: “The number of building permits in Allentown has increased by 32 percent from before we had a land tax.”*
Twitter acts as a public square, so people should be free to express themselves in any way they want, up to the limits of the law. We want Free Speech in places that act as public squares for the same reason we want the government to respect free speech: it is the only way to ensure critically important contrarian voices are not stifled.
Blocking/filtering algorithms should be open source, with every user free to implement any one that they want for their own feed.
The same should apply to any other repeal of rent-seeking institutions: anti-labor-competitive laws privileging labor unions, licensure barriers privileging taxi medallion holders, etc.
The British used this method to end slavery throughout their empire, which meant: 1. much more rapid end to slavery, due to less political opposition to its abolition, 2. no costly civil war and enduring sociopolitical grievances that emanated from it.
Economic analyses indicate that compensating rent-seekers at an amount equal to the expected loss of economic utility over their lifetime from the elimination of their rent-seeking opportunity, as part of a reformation to end the institutions that enable their rent-seeking, leads to net economic gains, because the economic efficiency gains from expedited abolition of the rent-seeking far outweighs the cost of the compensation.
If that's true, then you're right. Assuming an effective decentralized dark pool, that is not vulnerable to side-channel attacks, is possible, it is preferrable to the centralized variety that traditional finance uses.
>>Constant-product DEXes
What is a constant-product DEX?
And for that reason, as private citizens, we should use market means, like the one Musk is resorting to, to push for it to respect Free Speech, so that diverse viewpoints have the space to be expressed. If major platforms, that act as public squares, play the role of picking and choosing what content can be published, and if they all coalesce around the same values in deciding what content to permit, then inevitably, the public discourse will be severely constrained, and biased in favor of the dominant narrative. This is dangerous to society because it eliminates the rigorous and unbounded discourse needed to solve the complex problems society faces.
It is privately owned, but it acts as a public square. For the same reasons that we defend the right to Free Speech at the public level, we should push the platforms that act as public squares to guarantee Free Speech.
We have already seen how limiting Free Speech, in the name of fighting "disinformation", can be abused.
This is the kind censoring I've personally been subjected to:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734
Meanwhile on Twitter, the "fact-checkers" are now taking it upon themselves to try to discredit tweets that make the leading personalities of the political left look bad:
This is abuse of the allegedly impartial fact-checking process for clearly ideological ends.
Another demonstration of this is the Facebook "whistleblower". She explained that she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism.
Yet another would be Twitter's policy of banning people who refer to males who present as women with male gender pronouns. This moderation policy enforces left-wing ideological values, like the idea that gender is a property that is self-chosen, and for something that acts as a public square to push left wing ideology via censorship is deeply inappropriate.
Like Glenn Greenwald said:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848
>>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation"
The fight against disinformation is really a fight to stifle dissent against the establishment and its official ideology, which I prefer to call Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity (DIE).
And what you advocate would be dystopian. Now that any one with a computer can create digital art and offer it up as an investment on a programmatic contract systemm, it is clear that the laws passed in the 1930s, if maintained, are going to require increasingly draconian intrusions into private interaction to enforce.
Similar to how if we as a society tried to continue enforcing obscenity laws into the internet age: effective enforcement would have required prohibiting public access to strong encryption, and heavy handed treatment of those found flouting the law, to make an example out of them for every one else.
But we are very very far from that point. We have needs, like extending our life, that current technology cannot meet, and if we had excess time, most of us would trade it in exchange for more technological progress toward that goal. Fundamentally that is what's behind the increase in healthcare spending, and the growth in people employed in healthcare.
I don't want you to forcibly prevent large coalitions of people, like companies, from making any offer they want to me. By doing so, you are violating my right to free association, and assuming you know better than me what's best for me. I am not a child.
I am able to draw upon the knowledge of millions of people, not least of all the companies that are the competitors of the soliciting company, and have just as much resources with which to counter-act any disinformation the soliciting company may publish, so I am not at any disadvantage versus any particular company.
Public knowledge, like Wikipedia, or the reputations attached to particular products or companies, is a product of millions of minds, finding and filtering out information to produce an accurate picture of the world that can easily be digested by a typical person. It's a spontaneous bottom-up process that trumps anything that could be created by centralized committee.
That's why Apple, despite being worth $2.8 trillion, is only able to convince individuals to buy its products by providing a product that is superior in quality. Individuals can draw upon the collective wisdom of society, and get a reliable indication of the real quality of Apple products. Massive companies, when they began floundering in delivering quality, have lost market share, for the same reason. See the rise of Japanese automakers versus American ones.
>> Indeed, that's why the concept of "age of consent" exists for sexual interaction.
Age of consent has nothing to do with "power/information differences". It has to do with the ability to provide genuine consent, which children, psychologically undeveloped as they are, are generally incapable of.
The ability to consent is why we allow adults to vote, and have sex, for and with whoever they want, respectively. By your logic, adults would need guardians in elections, filtering their candidate choice, to protect them from political entities with "excess resources and knowledge" manipulating them.
What you're advocating is a total rejection of a core principle of liberal democracy, which is that an individual is capable of making their own choices for their interests.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...
The idea that we ought to impose blanket restrictions on millions of people, and thereby sacrifice their liberty, in the name of safety, is fundamentally misguided in my opinion, and certain goes against the core principles of liberal society. Liberal democracies have to find more rights-respecting ways to combat financial crime.
Yes we know preemptively restricting financial interaction reduces some forms of financial harm, but what kind of damage does it do to society, when the only business entities capable of directly soliciting the public for capital, are those with revenues of over $100 million a year? What does that do to income inequality?
I don't like people promising the moon to hype up speculative investments, but there are non-government solutions to this, like reputation markets.
In fact we saw these non-government solutions working already: token investors in 2018, at the end of the brief period of reprieve from SEC restrictions, between 2016 and 2018, were unrecognizable from those that were giving a website with a white paper $40 million worth of cryptocurrency in 2016. This transformation occurred completely independently from any regulatory action. The collective intelligence of the market increased from hard-won lessons in the need to do due diligence, and the emergence of numerous sites for rating token sales (mind you, there was still a lot of room improvement in the curation market when the token sale experiment was shut down by the SEC. One promising avenue was Vitalik Buterin's proposal for DAICOs: https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465 which the market did not survive long enough to test).
Regulations can obviously address some of these problems too, but any restriction on how consenting parties choose to interact is going to have massive unintended consequences, and in my estimation the unintended consequences do much more harm than what's alleviated by the regulations.
Also worth mentioning is that the regulations that the SEC imposed on token sales went far beyond prohibiting issuers from promising big gains. They micromanaged how offerings were conducted, with inflexible cookie cutter rules that inhibit innovation and make the entire market dependent on a centralized gatekeeper, which is a monopolistic and fragile situation prone to systemic failures. One significant effect of this was that they eliminated the entire retail market's access to the early stage venture capital market.
It's obvious to me that a free society should not tolerate this level of control being exerted on how people engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults.
>>The fact that what's being sold are numbers generated on a computer is not the most relevant factor, and does not not warrant a different treatment than say titles of Florida swamp land.
The fact that an investment offer required having a title to a swamp in the 1930s made it so it was less evident how illiberal laws that the SEC enforces stifle society. Now that any one with a computer can create digital art and offer it up as an investment on a programmatic contract system makes it clear that the laws passed in the 1930s, if maintained, are going to require increasingly draconian intrusions into private interaction to enforce. Similar to how if we as a society tried to continue enforcing obscenity laws into the internet age: effective enforcement would have required prohibiting public access to strong encryption, and heavy handed treatment of those found flouting the law, to make an example out of them for every one else.
Financial interactions are entirely within the realm of voluntarily interactions, and those that are not are already considered fraud, and prohibited.
That doesn't detract from the fact that the headline, which is the only part of the article many will read, is inflammatory and misleading.
>>They might not be a Govt entity, but they also play by a set of less formal rules that do not benefit anyone but the closed group they choose said rules to be edit.
VCs took center stage in the crypto space because the SEC entered it and prohibited programmatic crowdsales whereby the public could participate in initial funding rounds.
There is literally no other legal avenue by which people can raise funds for cryptocurrency projects, and those methods being explored as possible alternatives, like NFT sales, are already being eyed by the SEC with a mind to ban them. And if Congress gives the SEC the power to do so, they will.
Ethereum, had it conducted its capital raising after 2018, would have had to rely on venture capital firms, instead of a public crowdsale like it conducted in 2014 that provided it with wide distribution of token holders.
"Securities fraud" here characterizes offering members of the public investment contracts without the approval of a centralized regulatory gatekeeper - something which typically requires a company to have annual revenue exceeding $100 million. That is of course not actually "fraud" under any reasonable definition of the term. It's regulatory-speak, to mislead the public and make these restrictions sound reasonable.
What I would concede is that it does challenge the dominant ideology of the establishment.
As this former Federal Reserve economist describes, the Federal Reserve system is extremely centralized:
https://twitter.com/gordonliao/status/1484605701435523072?s=...
This is just one aspect of centralized economic control cryptocurrency threatens to upend.
Centralization will inevitably engender rent-seeking, so the dominant ideological framework being one that glorifies that centralized gatekeeping, and villifies a free market, is entirely predictable.
That's a microcosm of the effect of automation on the economy as a whole.
The Deep State is any institutional interest in the state that is distinct from the public that the government represents.
One example would be the Military Industrial Complex.
Another would be those in the government who act on an incentive to maintain and expand regulatory restrictions on voluntary interaction.
Thomas Sowell provides his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 as a poignant demonstration of this kind of force at work: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38
I think you're technically right, but what you're implying is not. States following all kinds of economic systems work well together. For example, Venezuela works well with Russia and China, and is a fully socialist state.
And while you are right about capitalist states benefiting from the cheap labor of totalitarian states, capitalist states benefit even more from the capital skilled work forces from other capitalist states.