[mort96]

Your last sentence seems to suggest that if we just let the free market do what it does, everything would be fixed and we wouldn't have any environmental problems.

Are you not aware of the concept of externalities? How do you, for example, explain the fact that leaded gasoline was only replaced with non-leaded gasoline when "meddling" made it illegal?

[roenxi]

Are you of the opinion that letting the free market set interest rates is going to cause measurable levels of brain damage?

The official policy position is that the free market won't gamble enough if left alone and that it needs to be forced away from conservative plays. We must admit that this is, potentially, a contributing factor to the lack of responsible long term thinking in markets that are influenced by money (hedging in case there are aspects of life that aren't influenced by low interest rates, if someone spots any let me know).

Plus printing money and handing it out to rich people is outrageous. I'm confused at how anyone is can pretend that is a good idea. You didn't say that, I'm just throwing it out there Carthago delenda est style)

[mort96]

I was specifically talking about the last paragraph, that the solution is to not "meddle" in general. It's quite possible that the way interest rates are set is problematic, I'm not qualified to have an opinion on that. But clearly there are problems where meddling is necessary.

[infogulch]

Humans have a strong universal bias towards additive solutions, even when subtractive solutions are clearly better. I doubt regulatory policymakers are immune.

[mort96]

That's a non-statement. Nothing about what I have said assumes that policymakers are immune to any form of bias.

[throwawaymaths]

> Humans have a strong universal bias towards additive solutions, even when subtractive solutions are clearly better.

That's a very profound statement, are you kidding me?

[throwawaymaths]

Bad response. Nowhere do I claim that no meddling is good. I simply claim that this one form of meddling is really fucking bad and it's hard to see that meddling can be the root cause when you are predisposed to meddle.

The irony is that you're falling victim to exactly this phenomenon: I claim that meddling in one form is bad and you pull out a knee-jerk argument with a buzzword (externalities) that injects a misinterpretation of the logic in the argument. When you are predisposed to meddle, you put up barriers to understanding my argument.

Anyways, my point is exactly that central banking makes blindness to externalities worse.

[throwaway894345]

I don't know that I agree with the idea that the government should take no direct role in managing the economy, but that's a different argument than "the government shouldn't regulate externalities". I think there's a reasonable distinction between "protecting public health" and "manipulating the economy". Certainly regulating public health will have downstream economic impacts, but those impacts aren't the purpose.

[luciusdomitius]

Yes, externalities must indeed be settled. However, leaded petrol (same chap also invented freon (!) btw - talk about being unlucky :D) cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that.

Freon would be a much more interesting example as it hurts societies in the long-term and not individuals in the short.

[KptMarchewa]

Unfortunately governments can also fail in settling externalities. For example, making it hard to extract oil domestically only shifts production to other countries, which are often bad authoritarian states.

Better way is to tax consumption, but that has never been popular in US.

[galangalalgol]

The US is a "low trust" society. We don't trust our government. Our entire system was in fact designed assuming the axiom that people in power cannot be trusted. People are not confident those tax dollars would be used to offset the externality, as opposed to a pet project. Sadly, our history would seem to make that lack of confidence rational. But, denying our government the power to govern isn't the solution, demanding (and getting) transparency and personal accountability that is meaningfully severe is.

[SkyMarshal]

Technically the US is a “high trust” society. Meaning we have institutions like rule of law, independent courts, and elections that are trusted by society to facilitate commercial and legal relations between people, rather than personal relationships and kinships.

Yes we complain a lot and criticize the government and don’t fully trust our polarized politicians, but a real “low trust” society is a far cry from what we have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...

[luciusdomitius]

This might have been true 10 years ago, but now (just from the wiki examples):

1. More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-bide...

2. US tax system is not voluntary, but extremely coercive - the IRS is legendary in its blood-houndness and the US is probably the only country in the world that taxes non-resident citizens.

3. Abortion-Rights Protest Targets Homes of Kavanaugh, Roberts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-08/abortion-...

I am not sure if the US could already be classified as a low-trust society (probably not yet), but a strong negative trend is definitely present.

[throwaway894345]

The US can have lower levels of trust than it previously had while still having levels of trust that significantly exceed the median. This seems to be a popular misunderstanding in the last decade.

I'm not sure if this is the parent's intent, but there's a whole lot of sincere "the US is a third world country" sort of argumentation going around, predicated entirely on observations that the US falls short of certain utopian ideals). "The US should continue to improve" doesn't depend on pretense that the US lags the median for a given category, and I strongly suspect that this sort of rhetoric gives way to the sort of fatalism that prevents societies from progressing ("we can't progress, we're stuck in this miserable system, etc").

[galangalalgol]

Is this getting downvotes because it doesn't speak to or support the question of the level of trust in the US government? Or is it getting downvotes because the politics of the poster are evident, and people are disagreeing with those politics? I am pretty sure the poster and I would disagree very strongly and on many things, but this post would seem to relate directly on the matter discussed. We do have a decreasing level of trust in our government, and it is beginning to have the sorts of impacts mentioned in the wiki article. Our relatively high standard of living compared to those other low trust countries hides them to some degree by making uprisings less inviting.

[danaris]

Taxing consumption is inherently regressive. By its nature, it places a disproportionate amount of the burden on those least able to pay for it.

[jcadam]

There are ways to address that. For example - exempting certain things like staple food items.

[danaris]

No, there really aren't. You can mitigate the regressive nature of consumption taxes, but you can't eliminate them.

Fundamentally, poor and middle-class people spend a higher percentage of their annual income on goods and services than rich people do. There just isn't enough stuff that one could ever want to buy (or services to partake in) for rich people to spend the same proportion annually.

The best you'd be able to manage is limiting your consumption taxes to things that only very wealthy people can afford in the first place, like superyachts. But at that point, a) you're not managing to bring in a huge amount of revenue with it, and b) you might as well just raise the higher income tax brackets, or add taxes on wealth over $X amount.

[jcadam]

If you could replace income tax with a national sales tax, I'd be all for it. The problem is, everyone knows any consumption based taxes will be in addition to the current taxes on productivity (e.g., income tax).

In any case, what the govt doesn't take in taxes, it can just take via inflation.

Wealth confiscation via inflation is great! it doesn't require politicians to justify higher taxes to their constituents (and thus face the wrath of their voters), and it can be implemented by unaccountable and unelected officials at the Fed.

[luciusdomitius]

Yes, but it is as socially unfair as government services being charged on for-profit basis. Or even a bit more.

I am the most anti-socialist person I know and even to me, inflation is too cruel of a tax.

[Mountain_Skies]

I my state, local sales taxes (which are a consumption tax) are hugely popular, especially in conservative areas. The reason is simple: voters know upfront what the taxes going to be used for (usually education related capital expenses and road improvements), when the tax will expire, and that it will only be used in the county instead of being shipped off somewhere else to be administered and a portion skimmed off. Each time they come up for renewal, they usually get passed by a large margin. So maybe the problem isn't that people don't like consumption taxes but that they don't like taxes disappearing into a black hole with dubious or non-existent benefits or even used to create negative value to the community.

[dpark]

> leaded petrol cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that.

This is the same fallacious thinking “libertarians” fall into when they think civil court will solve for most regulations/codes. The burden of proving harm is too high. Probably hundreds of millions were spent proving that leaded gasoline was unsafe. No criminal prosecution could have accomplished that. They simply don’t have the resources.

And who would they have prosecuted anyway? The gasoline companies weren’t actually the ones causing the harm. It was the billions of people driving around burning the stuff.

There’s a reason we end up with laws regulating specific things like this. It’s untenable for the courts to handle otherwise.

[luciusdomitius]

In case you are actually asking a question - most environmental guidelines in today's EU cities are the result of court cases. Both my hometown and the city I currently live in have been found guilty of neglecting air quality multiple times and ordered to take action. And yeah - in a libertarian (actually an-cap) world it wouldn't be a city, but a municipal services corporation with participatory ownership (a la UK Premier League).

But then again I am not really an anarcho-capitalist, but an extremely mild minarchist (imagine Raegan without his naiveness or Thatcher without her inferiority complex). So even this doesn't represent my opinion.

[scrubs]

You're right externalities are an issue. However, consider rating agencies in the 2008 housing crisis. By not downgrading junk they made the problem worse. If the market worked like a rational market, we'd be better off. Alas, human organizations are not rational sometimes.

[rapind]

That’s not how I read his post. Regardless you can mark me down as someone who doesn’t want the government trying to “goose” our economy through increasingly complex methods, like artificially low interest rates, corporate welfare, etc.

I do however fully support reasonable regulations (consequences for externalities), building infrastructure, universal aid and healthcare programs, etc.

Basically bad decisions like over borrowing, and bad lending, should be punished (not bailed out or you encourage bad decisions). Financial decisions that shift cost to others (externalities like dumping chemicals into a river) should also be punished. At the same time a safety net can be developed (cheap housing, food, or even UBI) to prevent the most devastating individual consequences (especially those you may not even be responsible for). That’s my ideal at least.

[jonkho]

“everything would be fixed and we wouldn't have any environmental problems.”

Ah…age-old gaslight tactic. Using words like “everything” “all” “any” to encapsulate your opponents argument then using a non-sequitor counter-point (leaded gasoline) to argue a tangent point (a point not relating to interest rates).

[mort96]

"How would you deal with externalities such as cars polluting the air with lead?" is a perfectly valid question in response to the claim that "meddling" by governments into the free market is inherently bad. It's neither a non sequitur nor gaslighting.