So tell me, how do you start a business in the US?
If you have Transportation, Justice, Labor, Interior, and Agriculture departments, as well as the National Labor Relations Board, EEOC, EPA, SEC, FCC, FTC to answer to, how do you do it?
How do you start a business in the US?
That fucking pisses me off. I know that's not the intent of your post, but that really does piss me the fuck off.
One could start by not violating every labor, environmental, and financial law all at once. Does it make more sense that every business in the US has the constant attention of every federal agency? Or that Elon has done some particular things - for instance, things he's constantly bragging about on his own social media sites - that would tend to arouse suspicion, if not serve as direct evidence, that he's in violation of obvious regulations?
Reducing what? Reducing why? Reducing where? The choices have meaning, and your neglecting to address that show your wilful ignorance.
My insisting you lose weight in your GUT is not the same as losing weight in your SKULL. Where, when, how fast determines whether fitness, torture, or murder.
The truly horrible thing is, that it might not be possible. That the federal government has grown so complex, that it is no longer possible to maintain a modicum of control or to stop its further growth without destructive action. Simply because it is beyond anyone to refactor the thing is a more constructive manner.
Junk mail is bad. But voters going around thinking that taxpayers are funding junk mail is much worse. If large fractions of the citizenry can’t apply common sense and develop a working mental model of how the world works, we’re all dead. And I don’t mean that figuratively.
In 2011, most of what the USPS delivered was junk mail[0] and it's only gotten worse[1]. Junk mailers pay less per item than first-class mailers (actual mail). The USPS operates at a multi-billion dollar loss every year. Intuitively, we're subsidizing junk mail.
If you get lots of important items 6 days a week via first-class mail then I can see you having the perspective of junk mail is actually subsidizing this important service.
However, my guess is that most people don't. This is based on my own lived personal experiences and those of the extended network of people in my social circle. It's not made in a vacuum. Therefore common sense is that we're subsidizing an errand of cleaning trash out of our mailboxes several times a week.
I get that people are sensitive to government services under the current political climate but there is no reason we couldn't cut back service to say 5 days a week instead of 6.
This is not intuitive. We're maintaining a service because we have made a democratic decision to provide that service. The junk mail is subsidizing that service. I hate junk mail too, but we don't get to claim that the sky is "down" just because we're standing on our heads.
We could make a decision to cut back service if we want, but we haven't. I strongly suspect that part of the reason we haven't decided to cut back the postal service is that many voters are elderly and find the postal service vastly more essential than young technical people on HN do. I'm not in a position to tell society that it's wrong.
(And frankly, given that we barely have a working electronic payment infrastructure in this country that can serve that audience, I'm not sure we're ready to do that.)
>> I was taught that if you worked hard and kept your head down, you could have a comfortable life
I didn't even work that hard and I have a comfortable life. I learned to code, and that was it.
Your mileage may vary.
If you move to one of the most expensive cities in the world, one of the things you can do is complain that it is really expensive to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
You can do that. I don't recommend it, but it is one of the things that you can do.
The number of YIMBYs who own property is approximately zero. "Yes, I would prefer that you make my life worse", said no property owner ever.
I am a bad person. I want my life to be better, not worse.
No love for Pig Champion on Hacker News? One of the great guitarists of all time.
If there are any fans of the band here, Jerry A wrote a 3 part autobiography, Black Heart Fades Blue, that might be interesting to you. He's hinted in at least a couple interviews that he originally intended it to be something of a suicide note, but I guess things got better for him.
The problems with Piketty's arguments are addressed in the article:
"if America’s rich families in 1900 had invested passively in the stockmarket, spent 2% of their wealth each year and had the usual number of children, there would be about 16,000 old-money billionaires in America today. In fact, there are fewer than 1,000 billionaires and the vast majority of them are self-made"
Yes, if rich people invested their money wisely, gave nothing to charity, spent small amounts, and left their wealth to one of their children, wealth inequality would grow unchecked.
But wealth inequality has still grown quite a bit. Your point is not a refutation, it’s just an observation that the infection has progressed more slowly than it could have if it was completely optimal.
Why do people post stuff like this. If your ideology depends on misleading people about bad things that are obviously happening, just get a better ideology!
he didn't say it's ok. He said piketty is wrong. Anyone who studied even econ 101 and combined it with a teaspoon of common sense knows piketty is an idiot and that book is garbage. He's a politician.
Maybe actually take econ 101 so you can get the thrust of the book rather than getting lost in the details. His thesis, in that book, is that r > g and that over many years that difference results in very large accumulations of wealth. No one disputes that there are various means that r is achieved.
It doesn't change the thesis, which is wrong. r is not greater than g for any reasonable amount of time for individuals/families because humans have an amazing ability to behave stupidly and reduce r below g.
Piketty’s argument was not just that income inequality would increase, but that it would increase because the return on capital is greater than the growth rate of the economy, so, in his words, "It is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labor by a wide margin".
But inherited wealth does not dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labor. The largest fortunes today are dominated by people who built businesses, not by people who inherited their wealth. So if "there are fewer than 1,000 billionaires and the vast majority of them are self-made", that is a direct refutation of Pikkety's thesis.
It is hard to overstate just how bad Pikkety's arguments are. His argument assumes single inheritance of fortunes, it assumes that wealthy people don't donate significant sums to charity, it assumes that inheritors of wealth will invest that wealth as wisely as the person who created it, along with many, many other false assumptions. The most egregious one in my opinion is that it assumes the wealthy don't spend their money.
If a billionaire makes a 5% return on his billion dollars and spends $50 million dollars a year, does wealth inequality increase? No, it does not.
It's a ridiculous theory, it is directly contradicted by the facts, and I have no idea why it is taken seriously by people here other than just as an opportunity to participate in a 2 minutes hate against rich people.
They're saying that self-made billionaires didn't inherit their wealth. Which means they created it. Which means that it created useful economic activity. And since rich people dont optimally pass on their wealth, those 1000 billionaires' spawn are likely to piss away that wealth while 1000 more economically active individuals create more healthy economic activity in pursuit of becoming billionaires so that they can pass on their wealth to their children to piss away, ad. Inf.
If that's the argument, then it sounds pretty flawed TBH. I mean how does not inheriting their wealth, automatically mean they created it? Is theft not also a possibility?
"wealth inequality" is one of the dumbest ways of measuring the health of an economy, or to specifically aim to reduce. Unfortunately, there will always be a baseline group of people at, or near, zero wealth. The goal should simply be to reduce this number and the overall number of people living in or near poverty. Whether Warren Buffett has $50, 100, or 200 billion - which does affect wealth inequality calculations - is of zero consequence to the lives of the lowest-wealth individuals (nor did someone like SBF losing 10s of billions, help them)
It matters if one person can buy Twitter on a whim and use it to pursue his ideological goals, or if one person can buy The Washington Post and dictate it's editorial positions, or if a small handful of people can fund an effort to identify and groom a wide bench of lawyers to one day become judges who will bend the law in their favor. Not to mention plain old lobbying and campaign contributions. When wealth is power, wealth inequality is toxic to democracy.
>It matters if one person can buy Twitter on a whim and use it to pursue his ideological goals, or if one person can buy The Washington Post and dictate it's editorial positions,
Oh no, now it's important to stop this because some people are able to do these things while having political viewpoints that you don't like. Were you previously making the same argument against say, the New York Times, due to it's being owned by one family and following that family's specific ideological viewpoints?
Wealth inequality is an innate part of human society, and by itself has little bearing on democracy or even overall standards of living. There are also many countries with low wealth inequality in which democracy doesn't exist in any sense.
I don't think it's practical to eliminate wealth inequality. But we can certainly limit it. I would also be less concerned about wealth inequality if we had more robust legal frameworks to prevent wealthy people and institutions from having an outsized influence--for example, campaign finance limits and public campaign financing, elimination of super-pacs and dark money, lobbying regulations, and bans on government officials becoming lobbyists, etc. Instead, these guardrails are steadily eroding. Citizens United devestated campaign finance regulations. Last year in Snyder v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that federal bribery law does not prohibit gifts or gratuities given to state and local officials after an official act. Of course these are just the kinds of rulings the Federalist Society has hoped to see, financed by the Mercers, Kochs, and other wealthy families. Six of the nine current justices have ties to the Federalist Society.
I’m not the person you’re responding to, but I’ll answer that yes, it has always been a problem that so much influence is concentrated in so few hands. It’s been said that a dictatorship would be the best form of governance if you could ensure the dictator would always be the best one possible. But you can’t. When you allow such concentrations of power, at some point someone who is willing to abuse that power, or someone who is simply incompetent, will come along and it’s a disaster for everybody.
Wealth inequality is not innate; there have been plenty of civilizations with far less of it. It’s only an inherent part of free-market capitalism.
>Wealth inequality is not innate; there have been plenty of civilizations with far less of it. It’s only an inherent part of free-market capitalism.
Please by all means, name these superior civilizations with minimal wealth inequality. The fact that some people are immensely rich and many others aren't is much less important than how a given society regulates individual rights to live one's life and be protected by the law. Wealth inequality is also less important than the specific question of how these rich people became what they are and how much power they have over those less wealthy than them. Ie: You can't honestly compare a modern market economy with a feudal barony.
In much of the modern "terribly" unequal market economies, a Bill Gates or Musk can be freely told to go fuck themselves by anyone less wealthy than them and their wealth has little to do with some random average person's capacity to better their own life. The same often doesn't apply to societies with low wealth inequality, which coincidentally are often poorly developed and authoritarian.
I don't really care if Warren Buffet, Zuckerberg or Ellison can buy a dozen private jets any time they like if I live in the same society with most of my legal and economic rights protected, and with the ability to create a comfortable life also respected. I would however worry about a more supposedly egalitarian state in which central authority figures have given themselves the legal right to confiscate property and earned capital for reasons of ideology.
Also, while many on this site live in a bubble in which the importance and influence of Musk's X (previously Twitter) is grossly fetishized, in the real world, it's just not that important. Musk can throw all the tantrums he likes on the site and ban whoever he pleases, and for 99% of the world, it doesn't matter enough to be worth a single shit.
It's when he obtains literal political power that I worry, and the mechanism behind the kind of authority that could confiscate earned wealth beyond a certain ideologically or politically defined point can at any time fall victim to someone with the kind of grossly egotistical personality that someone like X's owner has.
having the legal authority to prevent a rich person from owning a social media platform is much more dangerous than that rich person simply owning a social media platform (in a landscape of others that it has to increasingly compete with).
> Please by all means, name these superior civilizations with minimal wealth inequality.
You have to go quite far back to find those civilizations, so you can't really compare them to modern ones. Also depends on what the goals of society are. It's possible that people are happier on average in a poorer but more equal society, so would it be inferior just because it has less material wealth?
> It's when he obtains literal political power that I worry,
Money is literal political power. If it wasn't, you would not be seeing a bunch of billionaires running the government. I agree that current forms of government also concentrate power too much, but there will always be some kind of entity that makes the rules, and always those with the most resources will naturally be the most able to take control over that entity and make rules that benefit them.
> having the legal authority to prevent a rich person from owning a social media platform is much more dangerous than that rich person simply owning a social media platform (in a landscape of others that it has to increasingly compete with).
I agree, but letting people amass unlimited amounts of wealth will lead to that authority anyway. Once someone or some group of people is wealthy enough that they're able to buy the government, they'll obviously use it to give themselves that and any other authority they wish. It doesn't matter if that government is small or large, weak or powerful. There will always be a rule creating and enforcing entity, and that entity becomes whatever those who control it wish it to be. It will be controlled by those with the most resources. The solution is therefore not to try to limit the functionality of the tool that is government, but to maximize the number of people that have control over it. That requires having a more equal distribution of wealth.
Oh my, individual ownership of newspapers? Bezos bought it from Katharine Graham, while the Sulzberger clan has owned the NYT for over a century. Scripps, Hearst, Pulitzer... how did these names get famous? Newspapers.
Twitter is much more effective at brainwashing stupid people into believing any old crap than newspapers ever were, there were journalistic standards in the coverage for one thing.
So you've managed to blend elitist ideas of some people being less or more "qualified" to disseminate certain opinions than others who don't share your ideological preferences with supposedly egalitarian ideas of reducing concentration of power.
Also, journalistic standards, historically, were little or not at all better than anything you see online today. Yellow journalism was a major part of media since long before the internet and newspapers pandering to very specific, dishonest biases was also pervasive, but with few genuinely unfiltered alternative viewpoints being available. The difference today is that a real plurality of opinions is finally possible and can be globally made visible. The media gatekeepers hate this and thus create contrived arguments about an imaginary golden standard of media integrity and mass misinformation.
Yep. A wealth tax on billionaires brings in some tax revenue, but that's not the key thing it achieves. It achieves no more billionaires. It is bad for society when one single unaccountable person can accrue this much power.
We just went through a crisis which the federal government - both Trump and Biden administrations - attempted to alleviate by handing people free money. Are poor people better off because of it?
Yeah brilliant “businessmen” are born into rich families and destroy their wealth pretending to be real estate developers and managing to be so incompetent you bankrupt a casino where the house should always win!
adjusted by inflation the stock market only grew by 34.10% between 1900 and 1982 when adjusted and even if dividends were reinvested. And that's total growth, annualized was barely 0.36%
Their wealth wouldn't have increase at all during that period, especially if they wanted to spend 2% each year.
Of course it accelerated massively in the 80s (1900-2024 was 2.48% annualized) but using the average would make no sense.
If you were still very rich in 1982 you would have made a massive amount of money since then. e.g. somebody like Trump invested all of his inherited wealth (and everything his dad gave him before) into the stock market instead of pretending that he was a very "successful" businessman he would have been much, much richer than he was in 2016 and wouldn't have had to be so ashamed about realising his tax returns.
Is your argument really that because things were really bad in 1905 we shouldn't complain that after many decades of progress* that we are now rapidly sliding back to things being extremely shitty again?
Because that's a really strange way to look at it.
(* driven largely by increased regulation, unionization, etc... all the dirty words for modern conservatives)
You might care to specify what exactly your argument is then, as I'd formed a similar conclusion.
The Jungle led to an era of reform over nearly a century in which laissez faire and caveat emptor were displaced, largely to positive results, by appropriate regulation.
That regulatory turn had been opposed, increasingly dismantled since the Reagan administration, and in the past month and some has been outright dynamited. The consequences are beginning to show.
If that is your argument, it would benefit by more precise communication.
OK. If I'm not making an argument then we both agree that my argument is not that because things were really bad in 1905 we shouldn't complain that after many decades of progress.
The 4% rule was proposed by Bill Bengen in the context of a 30-year retirement. Others have studied it in other contexts (including an infinite horizon) but 30 years is where the "safe withdrawal rate" literature started.
>> Isn't this why we declared independence in the first place? To get away from the British restricting free trade?
No. I'm not sure where you got that idea. If you look at something like the Boston Tea Party, it wasn't high taxes on tea that were being protested against, it was lowered taxes on tea that undercut the smuggling operations of people like Sam Adams and John Hancock. "No taxation without representation" makes better press than "No undercutting my smuggling operation" though.
In the early years of the US, between 80 and 90 percent of federal revenue came from tariffs. Not exactly free trade.
> In the early years of the US, between 80 and 90 percent of federal revenue came from tariffs...
To be fair, the Federal Budget back then was 2%-ish of GDP. And their political consensus gave the Federal Gov't very few things that it had the power to tax.
Govt spending as a share of GDP is probably a good measure of how involved the government is in the economy. There are arguments that too much government involvement leads to stagnation, which considering many of the economies the US regularly out-grows have higher share of govt spending as a % of GDP has some merit. Its an interesting economic question what level that would be which changes depending on how you approach the problem.
If you have Transportation, Justice, Labor, Interior, and Agriculture departments, as well as the National Labor Relations Board, EEOC, EPA, SEC, FCC, FTC to answer to, how do you do it?
How do you start a business in the US?
That fucking pisses me off. I know that's not the intent of your post, but that really does piss me the fuck off.
reply