Yeah, taxing the rich is basically the only way to make a society work at all. Nothing else works.

You can try to just print money to pay for social programs (in other words, what the state/government is doing when it goes into debt), but that’s only a patchwork solution and not a long-term solution, because eventually if you print too much money you cause hyperinflation. So, taxing the rich is the only meaningful way to run a society long-term.

overheated housing market

i don’t think a market can be “overheated” (except if you’re referring to a bubble). what does that even mean?

Rent freezes are only good for those who already have an affordable housing. It doesn’t solve the systematic issue the slightest.

yeah. the better way is city-built public housing. the city can either rent out or sell the apartments to people who personally need them, both work fine.

this way, you actually increase the amount of housing on the market, and also the city-built houses are typically rented out at-cost, instead of for-profit, which makes them a noticeable bit cheaper than housing provided by big private investors.

We are just people, wanting mostly the same things.

nah, i used to think similar but i’m not so sure anymore. americans, from my perspective, really are more crazy than europeans, and it’s not just because of propaganda. it’s also from a learned risk-taking behavior that took centuries to build, whereas in europe that didn’t happen.

not just any foreigner, a russian. that’s … that’s communism (/s)

it’s not even about being moderate. i believe the stronger vision wins. it’s more like this:

on some policies (like gender issues) you heavily divide the population because people see it very differently. some people will agree heavily, others will disagree just as strongly, and all you’re doing is to divide the population, which is not what we need. if you focus on economic policies instead, people’s agreement is much more even and you get a lot of support from many people, which carries you and the country forward much more, i believe.

They’ve already priced out millions of people.

yeah because construction costs alone are higher than these people can pay in rent.

as high as possible

as high as possible without losing customers to competing landlords

that’s just factually not true. i’ll explain it slowly so you can follow:

rent is determined by two things: cost of construction and profit of the landlord.

cost of construction is more or less constant and wouldn’t change if people have more money to spend. profit of the landlord is subject to the free market, i.e. if renting out apartments becomes overly attractive (as in, landlords make more money with it), then new people will enter the market to also become landlords and rent out apartments. since these landlords are all competing against each other, they try to be more attractive to potential customers by lowering their rent, which means lowering their own profit. that’s how the free market works.

inflation is kinda irrelevant. what matters is people’s real buying power, and that would increase.

*hire

higher wages are not the solution; universal basic income is. higher wages just mean it’s even more difficult for companies to higher employees, which means there will be fewer jobs overall. also, you’re excluding people who are unable to work that way.

only boot worth licking is the goth boot …

the reason why companies are chronically understaffed is so companies save money. why pay more employees when the existing employees can handle the workload?

like, what i don’t get, is how you’re imagining this.

people form a union, then strike, then what? simple, the company fires everyone who is on strike for “not fulfilling their work contract”. simple as that, the company hires new people. these can strike too and lose their jobs too. new people get hired. repeat until the people left working at the company are those who don’t strike in general.

what do you mean, “just strike”?

good article overall, well researched and well written, feels very balanced when reading it.

Humans like shiny.

guess what’s also shiny? all the advertisement that companies put out for stupid products. doesn’t that make a lot of other things just as shiny?

Gold has utility

not really. IMHO gold is about as useful as aluminum or any other metal, i.e. $10/kg would be justified, but not $70k/kg, which it currently is.

like, $10/kg is real usefulness, the remaining $69990/kg are people’s irrational belief that gold is valuable somehow.

the only thing that cryptocurrency lacks IMO is inherent value. there needs to be real use-cases for something to have value, at least in my imagination. i fail to see the use-case in cryptocurrency.

edit: Actually, there are some nice use-cases. like, iirc, “doge” uses an algorithm for mining that produces protein-folding-predictions as a side-result, which is useful in biochemistry and molecular biology, which could be used for new drugs for medicine.