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by flurben
1694 days ago
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Modern societies are not capital constrained, so capital formation is superfluous. The world is awash in excess capital among the rich, so providing government subsidies to facilitate further capital formation among the rich will not improve living standards. What you're describing is the failed mentality of the early 1980's : the idea that the wealthy are "better" at capital allocation than everyone else. What it leads to is not some utopia, but simply bigger yachts, and more expensive sports teams, and more expensive land, while the human capital of the poor goes neglected and untapped. What does the most good for living standards is the government investing in humans and households without capital. More broadly distributed capital, in other words. |
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So modern economies are not constrained for money, since money is just paper you can print.
But we are not talking about financial capital, but real capital. E.g. entrepeneurs taking big risks to start businesses instead of just getting some cushy sinecure. And the problem is that although the government can print money, Elon Musk can't. He has to risk his own money and his own time, in order to place big bets. He is the one working 14 hour days, creating new fields, while everyone else tells him it's a crazy idea that will never work.
As you start to punish those people and become angry at them for succeeding (ignoring the massive survival bias) they start saying screw it, and don't make those big bets, or move to a different country and place big bets there.
And it is the ability to organize production in innovative ways that is scarce in the society, not paper and ink to create money. So we should focus our economy on rewarding and encourgaging that type of entrepeneurship, and fostering the growth of productive ecosystems, because that creates the surplus wealth that gives value to the government's paper and ink.