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> You don't need to prove that an experiment will not fail. You do before experimenting with the lives, livelihoods and quality of life of 350 million people.

• anoncake 7y ago
  > Or, if not prove, at least provide some really compelling reasons why this time it's different. What qualifies as "really compelling" is subjective, but sure, I didn't mean to suggest that you should just try the same thing again and again. > You do before experimenting with the lives, livelihoods and quality of life of 350 million people. The way I see it, if an experiment fails, it does limited damage which you can recover from. Of course, the greater the possible damage the more careful you have to be and the higher the threshold to start the experiment should be. But if it succeeds, you permanently improve your society and learn what works. When the possible loss is limited and temporary while the possible gain may last until the end of civilization, I don't think you should be too conservative. Though running experiments on 350 million is kind of overkill when there are smaller countries. Maybe it's a better policy for large countries to ask smaller ones to experiment, promising to help them recover if they fail. > FWIW, I think that a Georgist land value tax would be better than a straight wealth tax. Sure, but what non-pigovian tax isn't worse than an LVT?