This is pious nonsense. Do you know what sex is for? What process created our sex drive? Are you a woman?
209 karma · joined May 9, 2010
You can have a neighbour who trough airbnb rents out to noisy tourists, go through a lengthy feud involving building administration and law enforcement, and finally make sure he makes sure it's reasonably quiet at night. If any changes in laws would be necessary to make these processes identical they should be smaller and less disruptive than an outright ban on activities like those of airbnbs lenders.
"A telling comparison can be made between WikiLeaks’ publication of the Iraq Apache helicopter attack video last April and The New Yorker’s publication of the Abu Ghraib abuse photographs in an article by Seymour Hersh in May 2004. Both disclosures involved extremely graphic and disturbing images. Both involved unreleased or classified government records. And both generated a public sensation. But there the similarity ends. The Abu Ghraib photos prompted lawsuits, congressional hearings, courts martial, prison sentences, declassification initiatives, and at least indirectly a revision of U.S. policy on torture and interrogation. By contrast, the WikiLeaks video tendentiously packaged under the title “Collateral Murder” produced none of that– no investigation (other than a leak investigation), no congressional hearings, no lawsuits, no tightening of the rules of engagement. Just a mild scolding from the Secretary of Defense, and an avalanche of publicity for WikiLeaks"
"The Pie Fallacy
A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that's not the same thing.
When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger," say politicians. When you're talking about the amount of money in one family's bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year's tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.
I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.
What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.
Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.
In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was. [5]
Kids know, without knowing they know, that they can create wealth. If you need to give someone a present and don't have any money, you make one. But kids are so bad at making things that they consider home-made presents to be a distinct, inferior, sort of thing to store-bought ones-- a mere expression of the proverbial thought that counts. And indeed, the lumpy ashtrays we made for our parents did not have much of a resale market."
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Taxes on wealth creation discourages it. (It may still, at least in the short term, be good for revenue)*
For extra effect do this in rapidly growing and/or rapidly changing markets. You may stumble upon an opportunity much larger than one likely to be left open in a mature and stable market. Doing this also give you a lot of the advantages mentioned in the post.
Edit: Russia does not (at the moment) have CFC laws. It may be time to learn russian...
"The feeling of understanding can, however, be deceptive. There are lot’s of high IQ, well read and honest (as in not consciously trying to mislead) people who disagree about solutions to problems they both feel they understand and have easily explained (tough often differing) mental models of. The issue of vouchers in the first comment is a good example. The “brighter” person does not seem to realize that the greatest benefit of vouchers (according to some, including me) is that they will give an incentive to innovation. This is something that cannot be adequately tested for in small controlled experiments. Your heuristic is great for detecting nonsense but it can’t help you find truth."
PS. I'm not discussing vouchers today.