fr11

twenty years ago it was common to make this argument about investment banking. I know a bunch of people who went into investment banking, claiming to intend to quit after a decade. A few did, but most did not.

The problem seems to be that humans acclimate, and so spending ten years on an enormous salary puts most people in a place where they don't feel like they can live on the modest salary they'll have if they retire.

A lot of folks, including Nathan Robinson, seem to have a weird idea that proponents of capitalism think that it creates freedom. I think a more accurate way of thinking about it is that freedom creates capitalism. Black markets are a sign of the imperfect control of people, for example.

But as for what we should do about Amazon, there's a response that is more principled than just breaking up Amazon because they're huge, and that acknowledges the massive failure in history of socialist control of things. (Sorry, socialists - governments don't run things well, with exceptions that are interesting and worth study, but not yet repeatable)

We need to ban companies from both creating and distributing if they're at a certain size. This worked really well in a bunch of states for liquor laws, and would prevent the current idiocy with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, and Disney streaming channels that have their own content. Let Netflix and whoever else wants to compete on distribution, and don't let them create their own content unless they offer it for distribution to anyone else who wants to distribute it, for standard terms.

Same with Amazon.

Those are definitely things that helped build this country, but one of them - massive brain drain from developing countries - (and by the way, you missed from Soviet countries) - is based on the fact that there's something appealing about living here. Some folks like to call that freedom, or a set of ideals about how we structure things.

I agree with the parent comment that lately people are really down on the US and capitalism, and others are super positive about it in unthinking response. Capitalism has provided a lot of amazing things - avocados are always available! - but also done damage and been destructive.

Similarly, America was the experiment and inspiration for modern democratic/republican governance, and a major component in the beginning of more freedom for more people, while also having been built on slavery, the killing of natives, massive environmental devastation, and other terrible things.

The world is really complex, and simplifying things to good or evil tends to lose a lot of reality.

an individual stupid person does not matter. A large enough mass of stupid people can overturn nearly anything. It seems likely that this time, the mass of people who've decided that Trump won won't be large enough to effect the coup that Trump is _attempting_, but it's larger than we've seen, and that's somewhat scary.

Not the original poster, but for me, because our political system is broken and we can never seem to do the hard part, so we shouldn't do the part that makes the system worse unless we can do the hard part that makes it better first.

I think we all lose, if we do decide to pay for this entirely through taxing the rich. We (further) lose social trust between the rich and the rest of us, and we (further) lose the sense that we're all in this together, and we encourage ourselves to further think about how we can get those people over there to pay for our stuff over here.

To be clear, yes, please, tax the rich. But do so with a progressive taxation that we all pay into, so we all share the cost to the best of our ability.

This is true, but misses the main point for how to determine whether the government providing money is better than not: positive externalities.

As an example, we all benefit hugely from the existence of an EMS (911, ambulances, emergency rooms) system, even if most of us don't use it much. That's a positive externality that's worth the government making sure happens, as it wouldn't necessarily happen without government involvement.

Similarly, public schooling (or publicly paid school) provides externalities: a literate society, a basic level of civic and cultural knowledge that people can assume as a baseline, opportunities for social mobility. None of those exist with a voluntary system.

This proposal doesn't seem to pass that test: at least, nobody has proposed positive externalities that come out of this.

I think there's more potential to convince the right wing and the center of UBI than student loan forgiveness. Certainly I think we're making a better society if we are able to do so. The problem with the UBI is that a livable UBI is too expensive for us to afford right now - even at 11k, it's much bigger than the entire US federal discretionary budget. A much smaller UBI that grows with time, though, maybe.

Plus - forgiving student loan debt, or, worse, Free College for All, would only incentivize colleges making college more expensive. College is already too expensive - it's literally ten times more expensive than it was 50 years ago, for no greater benefit. We need to find solutions that drive down the cost of things that we want people to have, not solutions to help us spend more of our money on them.

Yes, because there are more important problems to solve does mean we should ignore this one. That's literally the point of prioritizing - budgeting is based on recognizing that there are limits to reality - limits to how much money we can invent or tax without destroying our economy. You seem to think that we should get this for free, but it has to come from somewhere, and we're already facing an extraordinarily expensive pandemic, plus the West seems to keep burning and getting more expensive every year, hurricane season is doing more damage every year, we have more and more places where we can't maintain infrastructure, and, well, the list could go on.

A good compromise here would be to allow bankruptcy on student loans. Those who need it can take advtange of that choice, while those for whom student loans provided a significant benefit can continue to pay them back.

Landlords provide benefits: renting a property means getting somewhere to live without being responsible for major systems if they break. Just because some landlords don't do a great job of maintenance doesn't change the fact that they are legally required to perform a minimum.

In addition, property purchase is legally complex, time-consuming, and risky. If you cannot find someone to purchase the home that you purchased, you can't really get rid of it. Renting thus provides optionality - the choice to walk away. The landlord takes on the risk of not being able to find a renter and having to cover the mortgage and property tax costs for a space they're not using. If you think that'll never happen, take a look at Detroit.

This is not to say that landlords are perfect, or that having them is better than the costs of them. But when you are going around making, in my opinion overly simplistic arguments, you weaken the strength of the underlying case. It makes it hard to take other things you say seriously.