4 ms·

> Pressure to eliminate them is good and the state that best eliminates them wins This is nonsense. By this logic, corporate pressure to eliminate environmenta

> Pressure to eliminate them is good and the state that best eliminates them wins This is nonsense. By this logic, corporate pressure to eliminate environmental regulations is "good" because they are "ineffective programs". You assume, wrongly, that the benefits of public investment realize themselves within a timeframe that matters to the bottom lines of individual corporations. In reality, markets reward short-term orientation and externalizing costs. Traditionally it has been up to the public sector to take the long-term view. This is true especially in our industry. The majority of very-long-term-oriented investment in high technology that has no immediate ROI prospects comes not from VCs, but rather the U.S. government through agencies like DARPA. Corporate tax avoidance has nothing to do with seeing DARPA as an "ineffective program".

benlorenzetti 9y ago
Grandparent post didn't say anything about timeframe of civic government and even mentioned things like schooling that have a long time frame. Also assertion about DARPA supports a small logical induction, in that the U.S., which spends taxpayer money on DARPA, competes well with other nations.
AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> By this logic, corporate pressure to eliminate environmental regulations is "good" because they are "ineffective programs". Environmental regulations prevent a harm. A dollar value can be attached to the harm, the cost to compensate victims and clean up the damage. If a company is polluting but not providing enough value to compensate for that pollution then they're a parasite and the state does not benefit from avoiding environmental regulations in order to attract them. In practice not polluting is almost always more cost effective than polluting and then cleaning it up afterwards, so states that have environmental regulations will out compete states that allow pollution and then have taxes high enough to recover the cost of pollution from local companies. If that wasn't the case then it wouldn't actually be a problem. Suppose someone invented a way of converting CO2 + H2O + sunlight into hydrocarbons that was so efficient it put all the oil companies out of business. Now everyone is still emitting carbon, and increasing carbon would still cause climate change, but recovering the carbon using that process would be more cost effective than alternatives that don't emit carbon to begin with. Which would make doing that a completely reasonable thing to do. The problem case is when the state is externalizing its costs, e.g. West Virginia burns coal and the pollution spreads to many other states. Those are the cases where national regulations (or international treaties) are necessary. Not because the state is allowing a company to externalize costs, since it has no incentive to do that if the state is the one paying the full cost of that. But instead because the state itself is externalizing costs and that requires some external force to prevent it, equivalent to the need for the state to prevent the company.
- Retric 9y ago
  Your assumption is states are rational actors with respect to their own self interests. That's clearly a false assumption as politicians incentives don't align with the states long term welfare.
  - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    My assumption is that states operate in a competitive environment. The ones that respect their own self interests will succeed. The ones that don't will fail.
    - kasey_junk 9y ago
      But states (at least in the USA) can't fail as they are back stopped by the federal government. So failed states become a drain on everyone & at the same time the most economically challenged within the state pay the brunt of that failure as they cant move.
      - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
        > But states (at least in the USA) can't fail as they are back stopped by the federal government. No they aren't. A failing state doesn't look like Mad Max, it looks like Michigan or West Virginia or Mississippi. The federal government has no constitutional obligation to bail them out. > So failed states become a drain on everyone & at the same time the most economically challenged within the state pay the brunt of that failure as they cant move. The risk of failure is the price of success. Either states make their own decisions and take their own lumps, or we have some Borg Collective mandatory national conformity to complex corruption-informed uniform regulations with 2000% bureaucratic overhead. Example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
        Retric 9y ago
        If you compare inflow vs outflow of federal funds, WV and Mississippi are being bailed out. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s... Michigan actually does not look bad on a wide range of metrics. It's unemployment rate is right at the national average and it get about as much money from the federal government as it gives back. People pay attention to it because it's close to average not because it's failing. EX: "Michigan's poverty rate dropped 0.4 percentage points to 15.8 percent last year but the nation saw a bigger drop of 0.8 percentage points to 14.7 percent."
reaperducer 9y ago
You assume, wrongly, that corporate pressure is the only pressure that governments face.

benlorenzetti 9y ago

Grandparent post didn't say anything about timeframe of civic government and even mentioned things like schooling that have a long time frame. Also assertion about DARPA supports a small logical induction, in that the U.S., which spends taxpayer money on DARPA, competes well with other nations.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> By this logic, corporate pressure to eliminate environmental regulations is "good" because they are "ineffective programs". Environmental regulations prevent a harm. A dollar value can be attached to the harm, the cost to compensate victims and clean up the damage. If a company is polluting but not providing enough value to compensate for that pollution then they're a parasite and the state does not benefit from avoiding environmental regulations in order to attract them. In practice not polluting is almost always more cost effective than polluting and then cleaning it up afterwards, so states that have environmental regulations will out compete states that allow pollution and then have taxes high enough to recover the cost of pollution from local companies. If that wasn't the case then it wouldn't actually be a problem. Suppose someone invented a way of converting CO2 + H2O + sunlight into hydrocarbons that was so efficient it put all the oil companies out of business. Now everyone is still emitting carbon, and increasing carbon would still cause climate change, but recovering the carbon using that process would be more cost effective than alternatives that don't emit carbon to begin with. Which would make doing that a completely reasonable thing to do. The problem case is when the state is externalizing its costs, e.g. West Virginia burns coal and the pollution spreads to many other states. Those are the cases where national regulations (or international treaties) are necessary. Not because the state is allowing a company to externalize costs, since it has no incentive to do that if the state is the one paying the full cost of that. But instead because the state itself is externalizing costs and that requires some external force to prevent it, equivalent to the need for the state to prevent the company.

Retric 9y ago
Your assumption is states are rational actors with respect to their own self interests. That's clearly a false assumption as politicians incentives don't align with the states long term welfare.
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago
  My assumption is that states operate in a competitive environment. The ones that respect their own self interests will succeed. The ones that don't will fail.
  - kasey_junk 9y ago
    But states (at least in the USA) can't fail as they are back stopped by the federal government. So failed states become a drain on everyone & at the same time the most economically challenged within the state pay the brunt of that failure as they cant move.
    - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
      > But states (at least in the USA) can't fail as they are back stopped by the federal government. No they aren't. A failing state doesn't look like Mad Max, it looks like Michigan or West Virginia or Mississippi. The federal government has no constitutional obligation to bail them out. > So failed states become a drain on everyone & at the same time the most economically challenged within the state pay the brunt of that failure as they cant move. The risk of failure is the price of success. Either states make their own decisions and take their own lumps, or we have some Borg Collective mandatory national conformity to complex corruption-informed uniform regulations with 2000% bureaucratic overhead. Example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
      - Retric 9y ago
        If you compare inflow vs outflow of federal funds, WV and Mississippi are being bailed out. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s... Michigan actually does not look bad on a wide range of metrics. It's unemployment rate is right at the national average and it get about as much money from the federal government as it gives back. People pay attention to it because it's close to average not because it's failing. EX: "Michigan's poverty rate dropped 0.4 percentage points to 15.8 percent last year but the nation saw a bigger drop of 0.8 percentage points to 14.7 percent."

reaperducer 9y ago

You assume, wrongly, that corporate pressure is the only pressure that governments face.