kapuasuite

How dangerous is it to dump it in the river now?

> When it comes to growth, Britain’s politicians will the ends but not the means. They run scared of the homeowning elderly, who turn up to vote and make up a growing share of the electorate. So tax rises are heaped on businesses and workers instead, further harming the economy. The government has likewise watered down its plans for reforming the planning system—because elderly homeowners object.

This is it - over taxing and over regulating productive activity eventually leads to less growth and lower standards of living.

> a new group who are there to just enrich themselves.

The UK’s been ruled by a relatively small hereditary aristocracy for, what, 1,000 years? A self-interested political class is hardly a new phenomenon there.

The problem is, one, that those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live (unless we’re shipping homeless people off to empty homes), and two, that homeless people aren’t the only ones in need of housing - there are far more people living in overcrowded housing, or who are unable to move out of their parents’ house, or can’t afford to live without roommates, than there are vacant homes. That’s to say nothing of the people who are overpaying for housing today, whether in rent or mortgage, reducing their overall standard of living.

There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners.

South Vietnam was already an independent nation…

> Hopefully, some security researchers will get their hands on it, de-anonymize the data set, and then regulators will burn the industry to the ground.

Who does this benefit, though?

The only compelling reason is to give broader and cheaper access to past works. If you don’t find that compelling then I don’t know what to tell you. What’s the compelling argument for them to exist as is?

The big extensions came in the mid-70s and late 90s, well within living memory. According to your own link they nearly doubled the average duration and pushed it over 100 years.

Congress is the one that’s dramatically extended copyright length, not the courts.

There’s no counter-argument to make beyond my self-interest in consuming creative works at very low cost and with very few limitations outweighing your self-interest in profiting from your works.

The Soviet intelligence apparatus spent a good deal of time and effort post-1945 ensuring that pretty much every state in Eastern and Central Europe would be dominated by the local communist party, parties which largely took direction from Moscow itself. In some places, like Poland, the process began even earlier when the war was still ongoing. The idea that they wouldn't have done so if Communist governments reigned in France and Italy is laughable.

Read Postwar, by Tony Judt. It's a pretty good roundup of what happened in Europe during the post-war era, including the start of the Cold War.

I don't see the point of the corporate tax at all unless people think the IRS would be incapable of auditing people that incorporate.

A carbon tax could easily be coupled with a dividend...

We would be better off with taxing the unimproved value of the land (possibly until the market price of the land itself is $0) and rolling back the barriers to building new housing. That would result in cheaper, more plentiful and higher quality housing.

I don't know - just thinking of construction, for example, we would probably have seen more innovation in that sector over the last century if every town and city in America didn't have its own zoning and land use laws that strictly limit what can be built and where - along with strict building and fire codes that specify exactly how it can be built. Those regulations shouldn't go away entirely, but they should be reassessed and we should recognize that even good regulations come at a cost.