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“ a special committee of Chinese Communist Party members”

Well, my father who heard about the ChatGPT hype believed it is an app you download from the Play Store and proceeded to download a couple of knockoffs with paid subscription features.

Animals eat farmed plants, and the amount of death/suffering required to produce the caloric equivalent is several orders of magnitude higher.

Perhaps the fact that he died 20 years earlier.

Lower income tax. Lower corporate tax. Eliminate onerous labour laws. Eliminate unnecessary regulation. Improve English education. Raise public sector tech salaries. Stronger accounting and capital market regulations. Stronger contract laws.

Those are not examples of true Veblen goods but rather goods which use price as a signal of quality. True Veblen goods are things like staple foods for the very poor where the increase in price eats so much of their income that they can only buy more staple foods.

I think we are talking at cross-purposes, but I read your comment as suggesting a single account. No one calls our IRA the CPF MS, CPF always refers to the IRA and Medisave is totally separate even if it is partly administered by the CPF board.

What is the purpose of that tax? In public finance, we don't want to unnecessarily distort incentives by picking winners and losers. Taxing natural resource extraction for no good reason chases away companies in those industries and forces them to pursue other businesses, possibly leaving only the most profitable monopolies to survive. If we want to raise revenue, why not just raise VAT, corporate tax, income tax, or property tax more generally.

HSAs are just like bank accounts. It reflects a debt owed to you by the govt/bank. The govt/bank doesn’t actually store all the money it owes on hand, it lends it out, makes investments or spends it. That’s why bank panics and bank runs can occur when too many people withdraw their money at once.

I agree with most of your ideas except energy ownership. However, as a Singaporean I have to say that Singapore has HSAs. They are called MediSave accounts and are separate from CPF although both earn interest. CPF is the retirement plan.

That's where the health savings accounts (HSA) and subsidization comes in. We want people to be able to afford healthcare but not abuse it. So what should we do?

First, require each person to set aside part of their income to a HSA.

Second, top up the values of those HSA's through government transfers for the poor and lower income.

Third, mandate that HSA's can only be used for real healthcare (and not alternative medicine). This way, individuals can afford healthcare but will still take responsibility to not deplete their accounts unnecessarily.

Fourth, (and in response to the NhanN's question) subsidize healthcare providers because healthcare tends to be underconsumed. Why is healthcare underconsumed? When we think about the importance of our own health, we only think of ourselves or our families. But we are valuable to our employer, to our friends. To correct for these positive externalities, some subsidization is essential to bring down those costs.

You are right in that my post didn't address the issues of childcare, let alone genetic diseases, long term conditions etc. where the price mechanism doesn't really make sense or fails. Any healthcare policy will have nuances that I cannot capture in a comment. But for the majority of healthcare consumption, we should really be trying to be as efficient as we can be precisely because of how costly it can be. Throwing away the price mechanism just because it fails for the edge cases is not ideal.

Let us assume that your concerns about devaluation come true. Let us say that Poor Man has $10,000 and Rich Man has $10,000,000. Devaluation of dollar by 10% means poor man loses $1,000 and Rich man loses $1,000,000.

Who loses out more under devaluation?

Elimination of the price mechanism eliminates a key way to sort out who truly needs healthcare (or whatever service). Consider a safe elective knee surgery. If you knew it was paid for by the government, you would just sign yourself up for the surgery for even the slightest ache. If there was a copay, you might reconsider unless your pain was actually painful enough to warrant it. Ask any Brit about NHS waiting times and they would understand.

Is access to healthcare important? Yes, but universal healthcare eliminates market forces which makes things efficient. A better way would be a mixture of health saving accounts (and redistributive transfers to such accounts) and subsidizing hospitals (to reflect the fact that healthcare is typically underconsumed).

Further, the government lacks the necessary profit incentive to keep costs low or maintain high standards. Bureaucrats on fixed salaries have no incentive to try harder.

If inflationary pressures get to high, the Fed will raise the Fed Funds rate, affecting the market interest rates, incentivizing saving, decreasing inflationary pressures.

The Fed is lending money to prevent a financial crisis, not simply giving it away. Look back at the 2008 crisis and see that the government actually profited significantly from issuing those debts in the long term.

UBI is a giveaway not a loan.