I interpreted it to mean, it was much harder than something else -- than another approach. But I couldn't figure out what other approach they had in mind.
Wealthy people pay a lot of taxes in the USA. If they aren't routinely avoiding paying income tax and taxes in general, how could that be the point?
It may be more realistic to view this in terms of elite power struggle. There are some constituencies that have found their way into positions of some power -- in government and public service -- that are in conflict with other elites, who have found some power in private enterprise. These groups battle for control of things. One strategy in the battle is managing the other group's access to money.
It's not clear from any kind of first principles, that we are better off with government allocation of a large portion of the society's capital. That hasn't historically been a big winner. Private ordering seems to net out a higher quality of life overall, even with income inequality.
If those with assets keep accruing more assets the median person will suffer.
How will they suffer? The people with assets, to realize a benefit from them, have to spend money. If they don't spend the money, then what's the problem?
I'm not sure how there is a societal problem with "run-away levels of wealth".
We have societal problems around food costs, housing costs, healthcare costs, &c; but people with extreme wealth are not bidding up sandwiches, studio apartments, &c, &c. If we "solve" their wealth by taking it from them and giving it to the government, what does that help? What good is the government going to do with that? Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living.
> but people with extreme wealth are not bidding up sandwiches, studio apartments
They are, though. Private equity continues to buy apartments and increase rates. States with increasing PE ownership also have increasing rates of cost-burdened renters spending more than 30% of income on rent and utilities, e.g. in Tampa, Phoenix, DFW, and Atlanta. Maybe not specific people, but the ultrawealthy nonetheless drive these changes.
When a PE fund buys an apartment building, isn't that really competing with landlords, not renters? The PE fund is not living in the apartment -- they have to try to rent it out, after all.
It's also a plan to hold onto real estate as market prices rise, flip for profit later, and not deal with all the issues that renters bring (management and maintenance costs, bringing up and keeping to code, potential damages and law suits, etc).
Keeping a floor or two active for Air BnB type short churn rentals while shuttering the bulk of a building can make $$$-sense to a PE.
"Landlords" (aka individual non corporate property owners of more than one residential dwelling) and real estate companies (those with portfolio's of land assets rather than those that just take a commission on sale) can do pretty much the same thing if the numbers pan that way and/or they have no stomach for dealing with Tennants for marginal extra profit.
Ownership of rentable property that is empty is a thing across the board, at least here in Australia where (stupidly(?)) investment rules and returns have made multiple property ownership a sound investment that grows regardless of occupancy.
Don't even need a long ( > 10 year ) time horizon, flipping on a two or five year scale still makes money regardless of renters being present or not.
It seems like you're saying, that PE, landlords, &c, are in a market where a landowner can hold on to property, not rent it out or put it to other productive use, and still make money. That is a problem, but not a problem with wealth or wealthy people per se.
Housing is only a good investment when supply is constrained. These PE firms buy housing because they see that NIMBYs are in control. As they predict rents soon begin to rise. Youve got the cause backwards
> Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living.
What are you even basing this assumption on? Just quickly comparing the highest ranking countries by Human Development Index with the highest government budgets per capita and the highest income tax rates would, if anything, support the opposite conclusion.
This is potentially a long conversation; but why would you start with rankings like this, which only go back a relatively short time?
Broadly speaking, human welfare got a lot better in the last three hundred years, due to productivity improvements that were tied to things like property rights, joint stock companies, availability of credit, &c.
We haven't really found a good alternative to it. It may seem to you that countries like Austria, &c, are doing the right thing by taking very large amounts of GDP out of the hands of private enterprise and using it "for good" instead of "for growth"; but that is just eating the seed corn. It looks good in the short term.
The HDI ranking has been published for 36 years now. And for many of those countries I would feel confident claiming the trend goes back to at least WW2, altough you would of course have to use other, contemporary metrics to support that to get a rigorous analysis.
If the initial step in your theory about human wellfare is to selectively ignore the last 35 or 75 years of history in the highest wellfare countries on earth, I think you should at least consider the possibility that your theory might be somewhat out of date.
Most of Europe post-war was very poor. I'm not sure the trend could go back as far as that.
How are you weighing the trend you highlight relative to overall long run success of private ordering, stock companies, readily available credit, strong private property protections, &c, &c, in raising people's standard of living?
Money is votes into the economy and what it shall produce. The more money you have, the larger vote you have. Taxes are the way the government takes controll over a fraction of the votes. Then the government can use this power to make good or bad decisions. One thing which is clear is that the billionaires is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing
Consumption is a kind of voting in the economy, I suppose; but the economy is heavily geared towards making things that regular people want. How many Corollas are there for every Bugatti?
If what you're saying is true, would it be unfair of me to say that the government is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing?
Is it good policy to take people's money because they aren't doing what we think they should be doing with it?
Thank you for offering this take -- it is the only forward looking one.
The anonymous internet is going away -- it is too supportive of crime and various kinds of gray area misconduct, and governments and large corporations were eventually going to do something about that.
Such a degree of anonymity is desirable, but it is not a requirement for a free society. What were things like before the internet? You couldn't anonymously browse billions of pages of information in 1960.
Since July 2022, Driver Drowsiness and Attention Warning (DDAW) systems have been required in all new vehicle types within the European Union (EU). They will be mandatory for all newly registered vehicles from July 2024.
The old, open web is too easy to attack and that is part of what has led sites to adopt technologies like this. I hope there are better solutions than everyone-is-their-GoogleID, but how realistic is it that people just trying to run a bakery, a bicycle ride, &c, will find them? They have other things to do.
Not really. The FAA revised the rule, but that was their choice, not the result of a ruling or even the reasoned application of a general principle.
The very broad power of administrative rulemaking held by that agency is unchanged -- and the power of agencies generally, to make law without legislating, without accountability to the electorate, actually has nothing to do with this administration, does it? It actually has nothing to do with any of them. It's something the legislature has allowed to grow and grow over successive administrations, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power.
I am not sure what is a better alternative. Laws can set the broad guidelines, but the people in those administrative roles have to make explicit decisions when gray areas inevitably arise. The legislature is free to codify the exact rules it wants when they disagree with the current setup.
They are free to do it but don't. That's exactly the problem. They also don't respond to overreach in rulemaking by revising the grants they have made, so it has been a cumulative process.
Interesting points, glad to have started this conversation.
Re this being the FAA's choice, I was reacting to this line in the reporting: "On April 10, Levine and his lawyers pressed ahead by filing an emergency motion [... which... ] may have expedited the government’s next move [to replace] the sweeping flight restrictions with a “national security advisory” [and dropping] all mentions of flight restrictions and criminal charges." Maybe Ars is being too rosy-viewed about the causality there, idk. I have no partic feeling one way or the other though I do want to take whatever comfort I can in the notion that the "system of checks and balances" is working. I'd rather go to bed thinking it is, than tell myself cynically that this was just another whim of an agency, with no real principled attitude.
I believe that the Trump administration in particular - not Republicans as opposed to Democrats - has abused agency independence in a manner unprecedented in recent American politics. I think agencies SHOULD act autonomously to determine specifics just like this one - what vehicles/devices, with what capabilities, can fly where and in what manner, and that we SHOULD value "expert advice" in such situations instead of using that phrase as invective. I think the American people should celebrate that we grant such freedoms because it lets us all benefit from expertise - but they should also understand that there is a price to pay in vigilance, of having to challenge the legality of agency actions if the particular implementation of regulations infringes on constitutional rights. But it's not just litigation that will prevent abuse - the first line of defense against it should be the expectation that administrations will consider themselves beholden to certain social norms of cautious use of power. Do you believe that there is no daylight between this administration and previous ones in terms of how they view what norms they ought to consider themselves bound by? That's a genuine question, not a rhetorical one - if you don't believe that, I am curious to know more.
I don't think legislatures can possibly identify a priori all the ways in which rights could possibly be infringed and make their grants so granular that agencies can't possibly find abusive interpretations. Those can only be determined in specific, real, cases, when fallible individuals attempt to meet the legislated objectives by taking concrete action. I don't understand this idea that federal agencies have become "unaccountable" merely because they issue intepretations every day as and when they encounter real-world situations. The Chevron doctrine seemed a perfectly fine compromise to me - how this court thinks the legislative body can magically divine all the future possibilities and encode them into the acts that govern the agencies is just beyond me.
You have written quite a bit, here. It would be hard to address all of it in one reply and do it justice.
You write:
Maybe Ars is being too rosy-viewed about the causality there, idk. I have no partic feeling one way or the other though I do want to take whatever comfort I can in the notion that the "system of checks and balances" is working.
They are not being rosy about it but you are inferring the wrong lesson from this. There wasn't a judgment or some other finding that the FAA had exceeded their authority and this kind of rule is too broad to be legal: the FAA just decided it was too much trouble to deal with this right now. In the absence of a legal finding about it, they can bring the same rule back next year if they want. This isn't the system of checks and balances working -- the system didn't even get going.
You write:
...there is a price to pay in vigilance, of having to challenge the legality of agency actions if the particular implementation of regulations infringes on constitutional rights.
Is there a constitutional right implicated here? The right to fly planes? It is certainly not a press freedom issue in an obvious way, since it does not target journalism per se -- it has no impact on journalism on foot, on bicycles, &c.
I would like to better understand the reasoning behind what the author says here:
A balanced 16-cavity mold costs 3-4x more than a single-cavity mold but only produces 16x the parts, which is why they only make economic sense above 500,000 units.
I guess if a single cavity mold costs $30,000 and a 16 cavity mold costs $110,000 you have an additional expense of ~$80,000, divided over half million parts is 16 cents. So lets say somewhere from 5-10cents per part to go 16x faster. My numbers might be off a bit but seems in the ballpark. I also don't know much a lego brick costs to make in terms of materials/opex.
In this context, a cavity produces one part. A cavity can only produce, lets say, 200k parts. If you produce 400k parts, you only need a single mold, but you've only used 25k wear on each cavity, but you paid more for the mold instead of only 2 of the cheaper single-cavity molds.
It's not the same thing as being sanctioned. In broad outline, a supply chain risk is a company that can't sell to or have its products or components resold to USG; whereas, a sanctioned entity is one that can't do business with anyone -- anyone who does so will be punished.
Much harder than what?