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I am generally skeptical when it comes to how much good something can do when it seems to cost nothing. At least with direct redistribution via taxes the costs are transparent. Minimum wages only have hidden costs. Could homelessness be one of them?

On the other hand, correlation does not imply causation.

Whether income inequality is the result of a fair process is not the main question that needs answering. Is it fair that I was born with a usefully high IQ into a stable society that craves knowledge workers? No, it is a privilege and has nothing to do with fairness. Yet it helps no one to take that particular privilege away.

Instead, we should accept that some will be privileged and some will be disadvantaged, strive to improve living standards for everyone, and lift up the less lucky by way of redistribution and public services.

Whether inflation goes to profits or elsewhere isn’t really the question. That’s analyzing the outcome, not the cause.

After all, the higher revenues resulting from a price increase due to an increase in demand or reduction in supply have to go somewhere. If they all went to labor, would that make it “greedflation” too, just with a different greedy actor?

Legislative overreach as a response to judicial overreach?

Or is the claimed overreach just the court trying the best it can for lack of a written constitution?

Note that this article is the first in a debate series. Moreover, there are some prudent remarks in the comments.

What the West should do:

  • Strengthen alliances (America, Europe, India, Japan, “Altasia”)
  • Boost immigration
  • Institute industrial policy for defense

Also:

  • Belt and Road was an epic fail
  • Zero Covid was an epic fail
  • China’s reliance on the real estate sector for growth is starting to look like an epic fail
  • China is really big and that alone makes it the most powerful adversary of the United States no matter how many epic fails they come up with (not to mention the West’s own epic fails)

Key insights:

  • Tax cuts failed by having no noticeable positive economic effect under Bush and since (after looking very successful under Kennedy and a fair bit less so under Reagan)
  • Free trade failed by letting Chinese cheap labor destroy whole industries in America (after looking very successful in the Cold War era) because China was just so big and poor
  • Deregulation failed by causing the financial crisis of 2007 (after looking very successful as applied to energy and transportation)
  • Due to its economic failure, Libertarianism has fractured along cultural lines into progressive “Liberaltarianism” and right-wing racist Trumpism
  • A spin-off of Libertarianism that has tried to keep the economic aspect alive while staying out of culture war issues is state-capacity libertarianism
  • A bit of deregulation in certain areas would probably be a good thing, so the total demise of Libertarianism is not all good

Matt Levine’s newsletter on money and finance. Not usually my cup of tea—I tend to find finance to be dry and boring—but this man is a superb writer. Too bad it’s behind a paywall.

We are seeing deindustrialization and a lack of innovation in transformative technology.

Or so say people from the DIW and industry. Is it just the usual whining about the need for reforms to make our companies more competitive internationally? Hard to say.

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