cltby

16 ms·

121.
by cltby 6y ago
What exactly are Uber and Lyft free-riding off of? What public service are they abusing by operating a ride-sharing marketplace? In what way are they avoiding their "fair share" when their employees and investors already shoulder
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by cltby 6y ago
> Seems like a loss for everyone except bureaucrats Not true, it's a great opportunity for javascript developers to get up on their soap boxes and share with us their moral and economic wisdom.
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by cltby 6y ago
$a is arbitrary. It doesn't matter how you arrived at it. As long as you provide a reasonable assessment to the IRS, pg's original point (which you objected to) is completely correct: an f% wealth tax is an f% seizure of your s
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by cltby 6y ago
You need a percent or two every year. Depending on ROE assumptions, after several decades you may find you've taken on a turn or two of leverage.
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by cltby 6y ago
Recent history has shown us that financing equity positions with debt (i.e. leverage) can be... risky. In any event, I consider leverage to be outside the scope of the parent comment's observation.
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by cltby 6y ago
You have x shares of stock, each worth $a. Your net worth is $ax. The government wants p% of your wealth, so it takes p * (ax) dollars from you. I hope we can agree that this is the same as a * (px). In other words, they've taken p% of
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by cltby 6y ago
> a wealth tax is a percentage of the dollar value of wealth, not a percentage of the number of shares of stock you own. If I expropriate 5% of your wealth, and ~100% of your wealth is in shares of stock, what percent of your shares have
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by cltby 6y ago
There's an amusing class of videos online in which conservative trolls ask young American liberals why voter ID laws are racist. The replies are invariably some version of "minorities can't obtain them." The troll will t
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by cltby 6y ago
There is a strong consensus among economic historians that slavery didn't move the needle that much. Cotton production was perhaps 5% of GDP. The slave stock constituted perhaps 15% of national wealth. https://sci-hub.tw&#x2
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by cltby 6y ago
I'm not here to argue about what is owed but by whom.The government is a system to implement (and pay for) a shared social vision. Walmart is a system to sell cheap foreign-made goods to Americans. People who gnash their teeth about co
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by cltby 6y ago
You are right to point out that such places don't exist. But it's worth remembering that the US was wealthy (and increasingly so) long before Keynes dressed up playground fairness as an academic discipline. Rich societies enable t
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by cltby 6y ago
For many people, economic history appears to begin with the New Deal, when FDR willed the middle class into existence with a chicken in every pot. A moment's thought should convince you that commerce antedates redistribution, wage floo
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by cltby 6y ago
In the absence of legislation, Walmart would pay their workers some wage $x. You have decided that, as a matter of decency, they should actually pay $z > $x. However, you and like-minded voters have only compelled Walmart to pay some int
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by cltby 6y ago
You’re not subsidizing Walmart. You’ve decided that workers should enjoy some standard of living but are unwilling to shoulder the costs of providing it (e.g. through taxes). Instead, you’ve kicked those costs to Walmart. Walmart is subsidi