Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by schrodinger 4441 days ago
Sometimes a short term gain in capital doesn't result in a long term social benefit. Of course people on vacation will spend more for a few days than a resident will for rent. But if that grows unchecked, the city will begin to lose its residents. Which additionally will result in a decline in income taxes, so it may even result in a decline in tax revene.
1 comments

And if the city loses residents, then it can't support its tourism industry as well, and then it become less of an attractive tourist destination. This really seems like a self correcting problem.
Virtually all problems of civilization are "self-correcting" in one fashion or other.

But that doesn't mean that the residents of a city are obligated to just sit around until a problem, say gang violence or murder-for-hire, corrects itself. "Society" is about taking action to, uh, "proactively" correct these things.

That correction cycle could take decades, and some neighborhoods could be altered dramatically in the process. It really doesn't affect me at all either way, but I can acknowledge that some people have concerns, or at least a legitimate interest in managing probable outcomes.
It isn't necessarily the case. When individuals optimize their outcomes, they often make decisions that are not optimal from the whole group perspective. In such cases regulations are necessarily to achieve optimal global solution.