8 ms·

1. UBI 2. LVT 3. Environmental externality taxes That's all we need to fix the 21st century. Simple as hell so basically immune to regulatory capture, and wi

1. UBI 2. LVT 3. Environmental externality taxes That's all we need to fix the 21st century. Simple as hell so basically immune to regulatory capture, and will usher in a rate of progress we haven't seen in 100 years, if ever.

DeonPenny 6y ago
We went from riding horses to computer and space ship so I don't know if those will have the same impact capitalism has especially if we have less money for innovation
- tomp 6y ago
  Which of these would result in “less money for innovation”? Carbon tax can be made revenue neutral and will net benefit innovative companies and/or customers buying their products. LVT is literally taxing non-productive, limited, legally hereditary but actually “common heritage” capital. No damage there. I’m quite opposed to UBI myself but I think there’s plenty of other ways to improve the social safety net with less opportunity of abuse, the net benefit being that people are less concerned with staying alive (low Maslow need) and free to be creative (high Maslow need).
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  As the other responder says, LVT is good no matter what the basis of the economy is. But also, we absolutely have problems specific to today around automobile use and suburbia that ultimately go back to inefficient land use. Trying to keep society progressing without improving land use and suburbia is like trying to improve CPUs while not improving upon 1980s processes/chip density.
kashkhan 6y ago
Add MMT to the list. LVT is good for state governments that don't have their own currency.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Modern Monetary theory is theory not policy. The jobs guarantee that goes with it I really don't like. It's stupid in 2020 to not be trying to reduce the total labor per person. Sure, some infrastructure projects are really important, not profitable, and might even require the training of new labor to get it done. They should definitely still happen. But I see no good reason to hitch that to jobs guarantee.
  - bhawks 6y ago
    Reducing labor as a goal seems rather odd. Why do you feel people should not have the freedom to work? What would you rather people do instead?
    - lupinglade 6y ago
      Live?
      - bryan_w 6y ago
        But then who would do the work?
        lupinglade 6y ago
        More automation.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      Let's look at this in aggregate: Fact: Productivity growth stars exceeding whole economy growth sometime in the 1970s. Rather than a shrinking workday or mass unemployment, we get mass underemployment. What this means is no one can survive without a job so inefficient or pointless work grows rapidly, fed by the margins of the labor market. This ultimately discourages further investment, technological progress, and will lead to falling median productivity and then mean productivity. This is extremely dangerous for society. We'll end up paupers in the ruins of our past greatness. Maybe we already have, if one looks at our infrastructure. Basically, you can think of the lack of a UBI as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) on the labor market.
lend000 6y ago
Change Carbon tax to "Pollution tax" -- even on the topic of global warming, methane and nitrous oxide are potentially more harmful, and a pollution tax is far more future proof for capturing externalities.
- fastball 6y ago
  *pollution tax that can be reduced to zero if you are capturing (not necessarily at production) the pollutant you're emitting. e.g. SpaceX shouldn't be taxed on CO2 release from their Raptor engines if they are getting all their methane via the Sabatier process.
  - jdc 6y ago
    I'm sure they'd get capture credits.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Fair, I did an edit.
spenczar5 6y ago
Carbon taxes don't seem simple, to me. Measuring the carbon cost of many things seems really hard. What's the carbon tax rate of income from a downtown parking lot? How do you even reason about that? (the others, sure, much simpler)
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Yes, Carbon tax is the least simple, but at least the others free up the carbon tax alone from being at all equitable. That helps.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Carbon tax is the simplest because you can do it at the well head or the port for imports.
- chiefofgxbxl 6y ago
  You don't need to measure the carbon cost of everything. You tax carbon at the source, like power generation and oil drilling. The costs will naturally balance upwards. The downtown parking lot, for example, probably doesn't have recurring carbon costs. The gasoline people use to drive there will be more expensive from the carbon tax on oil and gasoline production, and the cement or asphalt that takes electricity to produce will be covered by the source-charge on power plants.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    That works for internal products, but not foreign ones. If you're importing from somewhere that also has a comparable carbon tax it's fine, but otherwise you have to apply the carbon tax to all imports. Doing so also likely violates any free trade agreements you've signed. It's a hard problem, but the gains are massive, so it's worth it. It'll be a lot easier if a set of countries do this together.
    - snaily 6y ago
      To elaborate on that last point, one concrete model that was on the HN front page lately was the "climate club": https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001
darawk 6y ago
I totally agree, although I would expand the LVT to tax on all non-commodity property (e.g. intellectual property, like patents, copyrights, domain names, etc.). I think LVT is the biggest and most important of these types of taxes, but taxing all non-commodity property in the style recommended by Glen Weyl is even better.
chills 6y ago
I think you'd need to widen point 3 to be a Pigovian tax[1], and add a fourth point for a severance tax[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_tax
quotemstr 6y ago
> UBI I'm skeptical of UBI. The idea doesn't include any kind of automatic stabilization system to set the UBI at a sustainable level. Because UBI is not market-based, there's little information that flows into the process that sets of level of UBI and other redistribution systems. In a market system, a distributed consensus algorithm governs both wages and prices and adjusts both continuously to account for changes in scarcity and utility. Who decides how much UBI is enough? What procedure will that person or body use? What is the algorithm that prevents UBI increasing without bound? After all, the public voting itself unsustainable transfers from the state is one of the classic failure modes of democracy. No matter the initial level of UBI, there will be someone who's able to gain political advantage by claiming that the UBI is insufficient for a dignified existence and that human rights demand an increase. Proposing a decrease in UBI will be political suicide. What prevents UBI increasing to the point that it captures all excess value production from all of society and redistributes it evenly? Wouldn't that system be tantamount to the planned economies of the 20th century?
- meatspaceping 6y ago
  “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.” ― Alexander Fraser Tytler
  - pbourke 6y ago
    Give me a break. Some of the world’s most stable democracies have both a high level of taxation and a significant social benefit system. In America, in 2017, there was a group who decided that they could “vote themselves largesse from the public treasury” and it was not “voters”. The end result is referred to as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
exabrial 6y ago
No we don't. I will never participate in a scheme where we rob someone at gunpoint to "help" another person. The end doesn't justify the means.
- chillacy 6y ago
  That does contain the huge and unprovable assumption that there is such a thing as natural property in the absence of the state. See https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/why-taxation-is-neither-theft-nor-slavery https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/why-taxation-is-neith...
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Thank you for reminding the deluded world that property isn't a relationship between persons and things, but just between persons. So annoying that the vast majority of Americans seem to fundamentally do not understand this. The curse of too much land.
ropman76 6y ago
"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken I am not saying that the ideas you have listed are not without merit, however to say they will fix the 21 Century is a bit over reaching.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  It's sounds wise and cynical, but is there actually evidence for this? I'm not saying any of this is easy to do, but that's because politics and reform is hard. Not enough people can agree what to do != no one can know what to do. With fields like "mechanism design" we've blurred the distinction between central planned and distributed economics too; never have we had a better menu of options.
  - pocketgrok 6y ago
    Economics is improving rapidly but it’s definitely not shown itself to be prescriptive yet. It’s a crap shoot how well an idea gets executed in the real world and I’d argue that’s not acceptable for something this drastic.
apta 6y ago
The fix that no one seems to talk about is to abolish usury/interest. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity outlawed lending money with interest many centuries ago, and for good reason. Once the core is fixed, we will see benefits across the board almost by definition. Ban parasitic and immoral practices (interest/usury, stock shorting, selling debt for debt, short and long option positions [aka gambling], etc.) and things will get fixed very quickly. Don't forget to return to a properly backed currency, not today's fake currency that allows the government to print money at will.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  This is nonsense economics. Whether monetary policy or "natural", Capitalism as we know it relies on huge growth to have good outcomes. If you want a steady-state economy, you're going to need far more reforms than this, and if you want capitalism without interest you're shit out of luck.
  - apta 6y ago
    It's not nonsense economics because it's proven to work. Islamic finance heavily encourages proper economic growth through correct risk sharing. Want to open a business? Get VC funding and grow the company, if it succeeds, all parties profit, if it fails, all parties share the risk. This is in line with capitalism, just without the immoral and parasitic practices that make it unstable, as we see today. It's worth pointing out that the SEC banned short selling during the 2008 economic crisis, I wonder why. Not to mention that without interest bearing loans and selling debt for debt, there wouldn't have been a 2008 crisis to begin with. The solution is less taxation, while removing the parasitic practices that underly the economy today.
neilsense 6y ago
Someone's spending too much time on Twitter
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Actually, I don't have a twitter account.
JimTheMan 6y ago
I'm not sure how UBI wouldn't just trigger massive inflation and knock a lot of wind out of the sails of people who receive the income. Wouldn't a less punitive system of welfare properly distribute the wealth with none of the requirement to be universal?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I'm not sure how UBI wouldn't just trigger massive inflation and knock a lot of wind out of the sails of people who receive the income. It wouldn't by being calibrated (preferably by being indexed to a revenue source and not to inflation) to be at a level where that wouldn't occur, which is a factor of productivity and other factors. > Wouldn't a less punitive system of welfare properly distribute the wealth with none of the requirement to be universal? UBI is a less punitive welfare system; any retreat from universality is restoring the essence of the punitive factor which also is the driver of wasteful administrative overhead by duplicating functions already performed in the progressive income tax system.

DeonPenny 6y ago

We went from riding horses to computer and space ship so I don't know if those will have the same impact capitalism has especially if we have less money for innovation

tomp 6y ago
Which of these would result in “less money for innovation”? Carbon tax can be made revenue neutral and will net benefit innovative companies and/or customers buying their products. LVT is literally taxing non-productive, limited, legally hereditary but actually “common heritage” capital. No damage there. I’m quite opposed to UBI myself but I think there’s plenty of other ways to improve the social safety net with less opportunity of abuse, the net benefit being that people are less concerned with staying alive (low Maslow need) and free to be creative (high Maslow need).
Ericson2314 6y ago
As the other responder says, LVT is good no matter what the basis of the economy is. But also, we absolutely have problems specific to today around automobile use and suburbia that ultimately go back to inefficient land use. Trying to keep society progressing without improving land use and suburbia is like trying to improve CPUs while not improving upon 1980s processes/chip density.

kashkhan 6y ago

Add MMT to the list. LVT is good for state governments that don't have their own currency.

Ericson2314 6y ago
Modern Monetary theory is theory not policy. The jobs guarantee that goes with it I really don't like. It's stupid in 2020 to not be trying to reduce the total labor per person. Sure, some infrastructure projects are really important, not profitable, and might even require the training of new labor to get it done. They should definitely still happen. But I see no good reason to hitch that to jobs guarantee.
- bhawks 6y ago
  Reducing labor as a goal seems rather odd. Why do you feel people should not have the freedom to work? What would you rather people do instead?
  - lupinglade 6y ago
    Live?
    - bryan_w 6y ago
      But then who would do the work?
      - lupinglade 6y ago
        More automation.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Let's look at this in aggregate: Fact: Productivity growth stars exceeding whole economy growth sometime in the 1970s. Rather than a shrinking workday or mass unemployment, we get mass underemployment. What this means is no one can survive without a job so inefficient or pointless work grows rapidly, fed by the margins of the labor market. This ultimately discourages further investment, technological progress, and will lead to falling median productivity and then mean productivity. This is extremely dangerous for society. We'll end up paupers in the ruins of our past greatness. Maybe we already have, if one looks at our infrastructure. Basically, you can think of the lack of a UBI as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) on the labor market.

lend000 6y ago

Change Carbon tax to "Pollution tax" -- even on the topic of global warming, methane and nitrous oxide are potentially more harmful, and a pollution tax is far more future proof for capturing externalities.

fastball 6y ago
*pollution tax that can be reduced to zero if you are capturing (not necessarily at production) the pollutant you're emitting. e.g. SpaceX shouldn't be taxed on CO2 release from their Raptor engines if they are getting all their methane via the Sabatier process.
- jdc 6y ago
  I'm sure they'd get capture credits.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Fair, I did an edit.

spenczar5 6y ago

Carbon taxes don't seem simple, to me. Measuring the carbon cost of many things seems really hard. What's the carbon tax rate of income from a downtown parking lot? How do you even reason about that? (the others, sure, much simpler)

Ericson2314 6y ago
Yes, Carbon tax is the least simple, but at least the others free up the carbon tax alone from being at all equitable. That helps.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Carbon tax is the simplest because you can do it at the well head or the port for imports.
chiefofgxbxl 6y ago
You don't need to measure the carbon cost of everything. You tax carbon at the source, like power generation and oil drilling. The costs will naturally balance upwards. The downtown parking lot, for example, probably doesn't have recurring carbon costs. The gasoline people use to drive there will be more expensive from the carbon tax on oil and gasoline production, and the cement or asphalt that takes electricity to produce will be covered by the source-charge on power plants.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  That works for internal products, but not foreign ones. If you're importing from somewhere that also has a comparable carbon tax it's fine, but otherwise you have to apply the carbon tax to all imports. Doing so also likely violates any free trade agreements you've signed. It's a hard problem, but the gains are massive, so it's worth it. It'll be a lot easier if a set of countries do this together.
  - snaily 6y ago
    To elaborate on that last point, one concrete model that was on the HN front page lately was the "climate club": https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001

darawk 6y ago

I totally agree, although I would expand the LVT to tax on all non-commodity property (e.g. intellectual property, like patents, copyrights, domain names, etc.). I think LVT is the biggest and most important of these types of taxes, but taxing all non-commodity property in the style recommended by Glen Weyl is even better.

chills 6y ago

I think you'd need to widen point 3 to be a Pigovian tax[1], and add a fourth point for a severance tax[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_tax

quotemstr 6y ago

> UBI I'm skeptical of UBI. The idea doesn't include any kind of automatic stabilization system to set the UBI at a sustainable level. Because UBI is not market-based, there's little information that flows into the process that sets of level of UBI and other redistribution systems. In a market system, a distributed consensus algorithm governs both wages and prices and adjusts both continuously to account for changes in scarcity and utility. Who decides how much UBI is enough? What procedure will that person or body use? What is the algorithm that prevents UBI increasing without bound? After all, the public voting itself unsustainable transfers from the state is one of the classic failure modes of democracy. No matter the initial level of UBI, there will be someone who's able to gain political advantage by claiming that the UBI is insufficient for a dignified existence and that human rights demand an increase. Proposing a decrease in UBI will be political suicide. What prevents UBI increasing to the point that it captures all excess value production from all of society and redistributes it evenly? Wouldn't that system be tantamount to the planned economies of the 20th century?

meatspaceping 6y ago
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.” ― Alexander Fraser Tytler
- pbourke 6y ago
  Give me a break. Some of the world’s most stable democracies have both a high level of taxation and a significant social benefit system. In America, in 2017, there was a group who decided that they could “vote themselves largesse from the public treasury” and it was not “voters”. The end result is referred to as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

exabrial 6y ago

No we don't. I will never participate in a scheme where we rob someone at gunpoint to "help" another person. The end doesn't justify the means.

chillacy 6y ago
That does contain the huge and unprovable assumption that there is such a thing as natural property in the absence of the state. See https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/why-taxation-is-neither-theft-nor-slavery https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/why-taxation-is-neith...
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Thank you for reminding the deluded world that property isn't a relationship between persons and things, but just between persons. So annoying that the vast majority of Americans seem to fundamentally do not understand this. The curse of too much land.

ropman76 6y ago

"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken I am not saying that the ideas you have listed are not without merit, however to say they will fix the 21 Century is a bit over reaching.

Ericson2314 6y ago
It's sounds wise and cynical, but is there actually evidence for this? I'm not saying any of this is easy to do, but that's because politics and reform is hard. Not enough people can agree what to do != no one can know what to do. With fields like "mechanism design" we've blurred the distinction between central planned and distributed economics too; never have we had a better menu of options.
- pocketgrok 6y ago
  Economics is improving rapidly but it’s definitely not shown itself to be prescriptive yet. It’s a crap shoot how well an idea gets executed in the real world and I’d argue that’s not acceptable for something this drastic.

apta 6y ago

The fix that no one seems to talk about is to abolish usury/interest. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity outlawed lending money with interest many centuries ago, and for good reason. Once the core is fixed, we will see benefits across the board almost by definition. Ban parasitic and immoral practices (interest/usury, stock shorting, selling debt for debt, short and long option positions [aka gambling], etc.) and things will get fixed very quickly. Don't forget to return to a properly backed currency, not today's fake currency that allows the government to print money at will.

Ericson2314 6y ago
This is nonsense economics. Whether monetary policy or "natural", Capitalism as we know it relies on huge growth to have good outcomes. If you want a steady-state economy, you're going to need far more reforms than this, and if you want capitalism without interest you're shit out of luck.
- apta 6y ago
  It's not nonsense economics because it's proven to work. Islamic finance heavily encourages proper economic growth through correct risk sharing. Want to open a business? Get VC funding and grow the company, if it succeeds, all parties profit, if it fails, all parties share the risk. This is in line with capitalism, just without the immoral and parasitic practices that make it unstable, as we see today. It's worth pointing out that the SEC banned short selling during the 2008 economic crisis, I wonder why. Not to mention that without interest bearing loans and selling debt for debt, there wouldn't have been a 2008 crisis to begin with. The solution is less taxation, while removing the parasitic practices that underly the economy today.

neilsense 6y ago

Someone's spending too much time on Twitter

Ericson2314 6y ago
Actually, I don't have a twitter account.

JimTheMan 6y ago

I'm not sure how UBI wouldn't just trigger massive inflation and knock a lot of wind out of the sails of people who receive the income. Wouldn't a less punitive system of welfare properly distribute the wealth with none of the requirement to be universal?

dragonwriter 6y ago
> I'm not sure how UBI wouldn't just trigger massive inflation and knock a lot of wind out of the sails of people who receive the income. It wouldn't by being calibrated (preferably by being indexed to a revenue source and not to inflation) to be at a level where that wouldn't occur, which is a factor of productivity and other factors. > Wouldn't a less punitive system of welfare properly distribute the wealth with none of the requirement to be universal? UBI is a less punitive welfare system; any retreat from universality is restoring the essence of the punitive factor which also is the driver of wasteful administrative overhead by duplicating functions already performed in the progressive income tax system.