Tiring how often this needs to be said, but if you want "C with classes", you can just use C++ that way.
I've been using C++ for more than 30 years (I added thread_local to Cfront back in the early 90s), and while the language has grown dramatically in that time, there is fundamentally nothing that would prevent me from writing "C with classes" using the modern version.
I don't do that because I also like RAII, and polymorphism, and operator overloading and ...
I've never used .NET and could not imagine any scenario under which I would. The libraries that matter to me are mostly written in C or C++ and there are more of them than I'd ever need, mostly.
Languages are both read and written, restrictions like OP is pining for are fundamentally for reading. As such, it is not terribly helpful that they can opt in to restrictions when writing.
I think book sales are significantly down compared to most periods in the last 50-100 years? Still a culturally significant thing, but economically not what they used to be ...
Ah yes, the old "we should actually be grateful to the ultra-rich, because by not spending all the financial resources they accumulate, they save us from inflation!"
This just isn't true across the time and space of human cultures and civilizations. There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus.
The current problems have tended to arise when desirable work is geographically limited which then leads to a much larger housing shortage in those areas despite the presence of sufficient housing across a broader territory.
Defining "good" and "bad" in this context requires lots of other answers first.
When NYC had a housing surplus in the late 1970s, many people considered it to be a bad place. But even as they did so, a new generation of artists were moving into it. So was it a bad place at a bad time? Or a good place at a good time?
When Seattle had a housing surplus in the late 1970s ("Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?" said the billboard in I5), many people considered it to be a bad place. But that was actually the beginning of a slow and steady population growth that now sees it as an incredibly desirable and expensive place to live.
Clearly, there are plenty of people for whom both cities were, at those times, "bad". But equally clearly, there are lots of other people for whom the very same places were, to some degree, just what they were looking for.
And these effects occur on even smaller scales. The neighborhood in London where I was born was basically a slumlords dream in the 1960s. Tons of empty housing, all very cheap (so cheap that my grandparents could afford a large home there). By the late 80s, it had become incredibly desirable and rather expensive. You can say "it was a bad place at a bad time in the 60s", but a bunch of people considered that an ideal place to be.
If we had completely equal distribution of financial resources, this sort of thing might be less of a factor. But as long as there are people looking for "value" and others looking for "luxury", the good/bad distinction doesn't really describe the world very usefully.
The empty places were by definition good for few people, typically people who couldn’t afford better places.
Artists don’t move into neighborhoods because they’re cool, they move in because they’re cheap. They’re cheap because, by definition, people don’t want to live there.
I am considering legislation for the next fiscal year.
I have come to learn that 100% of private landlords have increased their rents by the full amount of the UBI we introduced last year.
I ban private rentals and/or private ownership of homes and/or introduce strict rent control policies (depending on precisely how progressive we're feeling this year).
I am a progressive government. The free market has failed to provide a necessary service. So now I pass a law that creates a not for profit contractor that builds houses. It’s not that complicated. We do it with fire departments, police, and many other services already. Free market might have been more efficient theoretically, but when it fails in practice we find another solution.
You might be interested to check out the Viennese model - Approximately 220,000 municipal flats and 200,000 subsidized dwellings form the backbone of Vienna's housing system, housing about 50% of the population.
Prices in Vienna are so much more affordable than in comparable European cities - Munich, Hamburg, Berlin to speak of Germany, not to say Madrid, Paris, Barcelone, Milano.
UBI is perfect tool to make citizens obey to state. You'll always vote for your breadwinners.
Why, instead of centralised planned economy that failed ans killed millions people many times in history, not just lowering taxes and let people to decide how spend their capital individually? Game theory applied on UBI sounds really like an ugly idea.
UBI is the opposite of centralized planning. Instead of the state deciding what resources people need, and who “deserves” help, it leaves it up to individuals to decide how best to divvy up resources, and everybody gets it.
As for tools that make citizens obey, the government already has the best one: a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Everything else is child’s play compared to that.
Because lower income levels in the USA are so low that a substantial number of people do not even pay federal income tax at all. Consequently, "lowering taxes" does not deliver any money to those people. A tax credit would, but this is more or less semantically equivalent to an actual payment such as UBI.
At the federal level, in terms of general purpose taxation? Not really. Capital gains? Even less people pay that. Fuel taxes, aviation taxes etc. are not general purpose taxes.
I kind of lost the UBI plot, to be fair. I don’t really understand what UBI actually had to do with this exercise fundamentally, the exact same thing happens with or without it, it’s just that the floor of what “affordable housing” is gets risen. Unless you think that an unfettered, UBI-less economy doesn’t produce expensive housing? Which, I think we have many real world case studies in almost every major city in rich countries to disprove that assertion.
I do see what you mean, I think, now that I’m rereading and contemplating. A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.
Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?
> A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI.
Yes largely correct, but more specifically than "wealthy and powerful," I am referring directly to the landed class, wealthy or not. This type of infusion will ultimately be baked into the cost of land, which will propagate up to rent, then up to wages, then up to goods. The gains will accrue almost entirely to the landed class in the form of higher land rents with no symmetrical increase in costs because land itself does not incur costs.
> Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?
It wouldn't have the same effect but it'd have an analogous effect in the localized markets in which those subsidies are applied. For example, you'd expect the price of land (and so rent → wages → goods) to increase where retiring people congregate. But it'd be less harmful to the exact degree that the subsidy itself is less broadly "helpful."
> And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.
Rent control is already a thing, and typically good short term but bad long term: renters don't move out because they can't get such low rent elsewhere, and landlords can't afford repairs so things are left broken. It's a great way to create slums over a few generations.
Are you implying that landlords are naturally incentivized to build homes? Because in most circumstances, the exact opposite is true. In the U.S., the government has a number of programs that offer landlords vouchers in order to encourage them to build out more homes.
I was not conflating the two - I literally meant that there are incentives in place to encourage landlords to develop new homes. I am not referring to groups whose primary interest is to develop and sell - but to develop and own.
I know a lot of landlords think they are a persecuted class that is providing a necessary service - but that largely isn't true.
Broadly you can imagine two scenarios for simplicity sake.
1) Housing supply is abundant. Landlords have to compete on service superior maintenance, better units, better locations, etc.). Renting a home behaves like any other service industry that we come to know and love.
2) Housing supply is constrained. The situation plaguing much of the modern world. Land is limited. Landlords earn a higher IRR from jacking rents than they do from buying additional units. The landlords profit from control of the access to a scare resource rather than from providing anything of value.
The broader claim that you're making is that any increase in after-tax income benefits only the rent-seeking classes (since the same argument you've made for landlords would apply to all other rent seekers, including netflix, airlines and more).
I don't know enough about economics these days to know if anyone who knows a lot about thus stuff thinks this is true, but it seems on the face of it to be absurd, since it would mean that pay raises are substantially diminished by rents paid for anything where demand is not elastic. I mean, I'm not insisting that cannot possibly be true, but it seems unlikely ...
No, this argument does not apply to rent-seeking classes. I am describing land ownership specifically. Land is a totally n-of-one asset in that it is completely inelastic. It is not created nor destroyed by any human intervention whatsoever, and so its supply is not affected by prices whatsoever.
The relevance of this is amplified by the fact that land is a required input for all forms of production. People and machines must exist in space, and therefore demand land.
This does not apply to any other asset that we care about.
OK, so there are classes of activity that are fairly inelastic, but not as inelastic as those requiring use of land. Fair enough. But why would the cost of air travel not increase in response to UBI? It's not inelastic, but modest increases don't appear to reduce demand much at all. Or eggs (again, not inelastic, but not very elastic either)?
The housing:land demand ratio is also not fixed, due to multi-level dwellings (hence, for example, Singapore or Hong Kong), or increased density (e.g. ADUs or smaller lots).
I just don't see why you see UBI only affecting owners of a nearly-inelastic resource (land) rather than everything else too (even if to a lesser degree) ?
It would increase those prices! But that would then incentivize additional production, which would drive prices back down close to each good’s cost of production (modulo the suppliers’ dominance and ability to demand margin).
So same mechanism applies to land, except then there’s no way to spur additional production of land, so the price just goes up.
Re density etc: correct, which is why I’m not arguing this benefits homeowners or building owners, except to the degree they are also landowners. A building owner who does not own the land underneath his building would not benefit much, the person who he pays land rent to will capture nearly all of the upside.
In response to what is deemed to be unreasonable and/or undesirable landlord behavior ... such controls would not stop landlords from continuing to earn from their properties.
"Unreasonable behavior" is just "setting market prices."
Correct it wouldn't stop landlords from continuing to earn from their properties but it would destroy the incentive to produce additional housing, so nobody wins.
> UBI assumes and requires an elite ownership class and a powerful state to force them to share their profits.
It makes no assumption about an elite ownership class at all. It merely assumes profits, and rearranges how those profits are distributed (away from shareholders, towards labor). There is no need for community ownership of the means of production (though that might have some different benefits, along with some different disadvantages).
You need high marginal (or maybe not even marginal) corporate taxes and a committment to the concept of UBI. Who owns the companies, from the perspective of UBI, is immaterial.
Community ownership does not share the productivity in sector A with workers in sector B. UBI does.
Community ownership does share across sectors if the community owns both sectors. Why would it not?
Also, you haven't really answered the point. You may be able to get this established. But how do you keep it established? How do you keep the elite ownership class from dismantling it? (Based on historically observed behavior, the default assumption is that they will try.) If you don't have a plan that accounts for that, you don't really have a workable plan.
I didn't say that tackling the elite class wasn't important.
But saying that the existence of an elite class implies regulatory capture is a step beyond that.
Regulatory capture is absolutely a problem. While one could advocate for eliminating the elite class (e.g. wealth taxes, confiscation, execution ... as you wish), I'd probably go for tightly controlled political donations & spending, combined with a strong anti-corruption culture (which has been severely damaged by, ahem, recent administrations).
I don't think anybody but those that are really close to the halls of power and have sufficient capital to engage in large scale lobbying is going to be able to achieve regulatory capture. So I suspect there is significant, maybe even perfect over lap between the groups that could achieve regulatory capture and the ones that actually do, and that outside of that group it is pointless to even try. You can get into the club by lucky accident, you stay in the club through regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture requires that laws (or regulations) are drafted that favor your interests. The only ways I am aware of for that to happen are:
(a) sufficient political donations/bribes to get lawmakers to draft suitable language themselves (or via their staff)
(b) a combination of political donations and a worldview on the part of lawmakers in which it is "just normal" for those affected by regulations to draft them, such that you yourself are able to draft the legislation.
There are levels of government where neither of these require incredible levels of wealth, I suspect.
Both could be stopped by limiting political donations and a political culture in which "the chemical industry writes its own rules" is self-evidently corrupt and/or non-sensical.
True, but the USA has institutionalized the power of money in politics to the point that this is now a reality: what would be called outright bribery elsewhere is called campaign donations, there are lobbyists who get to write the laws that favor their paymasters and in fact it has been argued that 'money is speech' (it doesn't get much more bizarre than that to me). What Musk did during the last elections would get you jail in some 3rd world countries, you know, where they take voting serious.
Whether any of these require incredible levels of wealth or not is moot, I think. The reason for that is that it only matters when 'lesser levels of wealth' come up against 'greater levels of wealth' and the latter will always win that confrontation.
If you can manage to believe in a system of 1 person 1 vote for just a bit longer, or maybe even 3 poor people 1 vote, then I think there is still plenty of space for "lesser levels of wealth" to overcome "greater levels of wealth". There are simpler more of us than there are of them.
I've been using C++ for more than 30 years (I added thread_local to Cfront back in the early 90s), and while the language has grown dramatically in that time, there is fundamentally nothing that would prevent me from writing "C with classes" using the modern version.
I don't do that because I also like RAII, and polymorphism, and operator overloading and ...
I've never used .NET and could not imagine any scenario under which I would. The libraries that matter to me are mostly written in C or C++ and there are more of them than I'd ever need, mostly.
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