[Bjartr]

You come across as underestimating the scale of the economy and the lengths people already go to in the name of greed today.

You speak about regulation as though it's some new idea. It's not. There's oodles of regulation, layered over a few centuries of people gaming and exploiting the system and the system coming up with new ways to identify and stop it. People are more clever than you give them credit for and are more likely to simply game the system you describe to leverage things even more.

You say by making it harder to be greedy people will stop being greedy. I say it's more likely they'll find new ways of being greedy before they give it up. Then you're back to square one, but with a more complex system that costs more to simply maintain the status quo.

[unexaminedlife]

I think it's less about underestimating and more about finding the right abstractions and trade-offs. As far as I understand all the real debate is surrounded by "more taxes" vs "less taxes". No major debate is really trying to think of fundamentally different trade offs.

Some people may interpret it as a naive point of view. I don't think that's the case.

The "layers" of regulation I think could possibly be likened to a legacy code-base that has accumulated patches on top of patches on top of patches. But in reality the problem isn't that that was necessary. In reality maybe the original code kinda sucked or had a few malicious patches injected over the years (ie. case law, supreme court decisions, etc)

[username90]

> As far as I understand all the real debate is surrounded by "more taxes" vs "less taxes". No major debate is really trying to think of fundamentally different trade offs.

No, it is not. Its mostly between "More Taxes" vs "More Regulations". USA is light on taxes but heavy in regulations. Instead of the government levying a tax in order to pay for unemployment they enacted a law forcing companies to pay for unemployment. Similarly instead of the government using taxes to pay for healthcare they forced companies to pay for healthcare.

Other countries in the world doesn't have as heavy handed regulations forcing companies to provide services to employees and instead the government just takes money and uses that money to achieve similar results.