Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.
This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.
But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.
> This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords
Not necessarily. People live where they live because there are jobs. If they don't need jobs because of UBI, or they can take lower-paying jobs, they can move wherever housing is plentiful.
There'll always need to be other constraints on landlords because there's zero reason why they won't just all screw renters over in every area no matter how plentiful housing is.
You have to make it impossible for them to exist. Rentiers are the lowest form of business, and incentives need to make it difficult for them to prosper too much.
These issues are why policy was oriented around individual home ownership for decades.
Orienting policy around individual home ownership just ends up eventually with more people’s voting interests aligned with landowners, and is part of the reason why increasing property values and NIMBYism is so entrenched in American government structures
We could definitely stand to orient some policy around making sure that first time homeowners aren't typically buying their starter homes at age 40. Having voting interests aligned with landowners wouldn't be a bad thing if most people were landowners.
There's an argument that landlording gets entirely too favorable treatment from the tax code compared to any other type of business or investment. Seriously proposing eliminating property rentals is weapons-grade stupid.
Not necessarily? Not that we've had one recently at the federal level, but there are multiple studies that show that state or city level minimum wage bumps tend to show an increase in average rental price, by the same percentage, within sometimes as few as four months.
You have to live in or near the city to collect the higher minimum wage. With UBI you could live anywhere. Even outside the country maybe. They aren't comparable.
Commodity markets are necessary for survival. If we cannot make them work as a society something is deeply wrong.
Someone needs to be farming the food we all eat... If every farmer decided to just plant saffron who would farm the wheat and rice and vegetables that it is used to season?
> But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market
Hard to predict the future. It was only a few years ago when crop prices were at record highs and some countries were on the brink of starvation because we weren't producing enough community crops.
The cure for high prices is high prices. But also, the cure for low prices is low prices. The older farmers are used to it. It seems the problem right now is that a lot of the younger guys went through an unusually long stretch of good times and have never felt the bad times before.
I am told that farms are optimized for labor efficiency rather than profits. These farmers often have a second job when they're not out there farming.
With a low tax on land, we may not actually be encouraging the most efficient use of farmlands.
Given that people are loathed to sell their land for any reason, this makes it impossible for farmers to start new farm, leading to a gradual depopulation and collapse of rural economies.
Growing excess amount of food is part of food security, but farmers are going bankrupt because they focused on labor efficient agricultural commodity products to the exclusion of everything else. For many farmers, it's not even a full time job
I rather we focus on increasing food security in other way.
Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows as that reduce the amount of energy we are able to access. But how do we keep access to farmlands that we don't use now that we aren't turning corns into cows? I suppose we could just use these lands as pasture.
~60 million acres of corn and soybean in the US, the size of Oregon, is grown exclusively for biofuels. This is unnecessary as you mention, as are the subsidies to farmers for these row crops.
Do those crops contribute to the negative numbers reported since most people don't buy biofuel? Or does it contribute something positive to the numbers with government subsidies guaranteeing returns?
I haven't studied the economics of the biofuel farming.
Corn is turned into ethanol, and is then blended with gasoline. The US consumes ~14B gallons of ethanol per year. It’s a net negative because it’s carbon and water intensive and farmers advocate for more ethanol than is necessary as a subsidy via government mandate.
Asset inflation going into non-productive assets like land or monopoly privileges. Tech monopolies are famous example of this, which is why they're large percentage of the SP500.
Most loans are for land, which mean your banking system isn't directing loans toward productive assets which increase economic activity.
Free and open source software provide a ton of value to businesses and consumers. It's right that tax dollars is used to fund what effectively is a public good so that we can all benefit from it even more.
I can see a government requiring itself to provide some funding to open-source projects that it actually makes a lot of use of. But not just open-source in general; no one needs to get funding for some pet project that only that one person cares about and isn't very good anyway: putting some crappy chatGPT-generated code on GitHub should not qualify you for government funding.
There's always a cause and a church. There is an instrument for this: your donations can be tax deductible if you give to a 501c3 that exists for the public benefit. But that's not enough for you guys. Having seen the success of private equity dialysis clinics to redirect Medicare funding, you have decided that you want a piece of this government revenue pie. Enough of this greed.
Don't both, people like them hold society back. I suggest you go out and talk to your physical neighbors about taxing big tech, it has a huge amount of support. The only question is do you want a democratic administration to use said tax revenues to benefit the public or a republican administration to benefit a few private actors.
It's going to happen and I know what side I'd rather be on.
I agree with taxing big tech, but more specifically the agglomeration effect of their networks, force interoperability whenever possible, and dismantling other non-reproducible privilege if possible but taxed if not. Otherwise, ample regulation may be needed to reduce identified harm.
This is different from taxing big tech's income and capital gains, which I would leave basically intact, but my taxation philosophy would have significant downward effect on overpriced market capitalization of tech giants and would redirect economic rent that otherwise would be accumulated by big tech to the government in order to be reinvested into infrastructure for public benefits.
Primarily, I want the redirected economic rent from tech monopolies to be used to support software related initiative, whether that's supporting open source software infrastructure, support for training and starting businesses, and so forth.
Social programs often compensate for massive distortion in the economy. For example, SNAP benefits both the poor and the businesses where SNAP funds is spent on, but that's because a lot of unearned income goes to landowners, while preventing people from employing laborers and starting businesses. SNAP merely ameliorate a situation that shouldn't had arise in the first place.
So, yes, reasons other than efficiency explain why people aren't working, as well why there are still poor people.
Millions of working Americans don’t have cars. Also, you can make the median wage in the US without any collage education.
Poverty still exists, but vast inflation of what is considered’a basic standard of living’ hides a great deal of progress. People want to redefine illiteracy to mean being unable to use the internet not by the standards of the past.
Network effect is basically the same thing as urban agglomeration in real life. The value of a city is from all the people aggregating together to provide goods and services and people are worrying about the housing crisis.
So what is the correct solution to all of this? I would be tempted to reach for a land value tax except this doesn't really apply to cyberspace. The only "land" is built by the platform themselves, but at the same time the platform isn't solely responsible for all the value generated on the platform. So, maybe we should tax network effects.
I once partly cross verify a virologist's lecture. He confused a brother of an important scientist who made an important discovery. I have no doubt that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to viruses.
All in all, checking other sources to see if they lines up is a pain and labor intensive, never mind actually checking to see if the references are actually sound evidence.
The scarcity is in the originality and creativity.
Once you watch LotR, you watched like 20 percent guesstimate of all fantasy content because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough.
Which is why sometime when I wonder why there's nothing to watch on YouTube despite the sheer abundance, it's time to work on something.
This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.
But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.
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