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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18987 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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What about the biggest rent-seeking behavior of all, the accumulation of capital? There's "Destination-based Cash Flow Taxation" on the list, but will it really prevent literal rent-seeking?

Capital is useful so accumulation of capital isn't rent seeking in the sense economists use the term. Huge part of rise of the standard of living is due to availability of capital increasing labor productivity.

The pirate parties were split between two online communities, the far right and the tumblr crowd. The piratebay was financed by Carl Lundström, who was the main financier of the national democrats, the Swedish equivalent to the British national party. Much of the support for the pirate party came from gamer gate and 4chan types. The founding group had a mix of anti-establishment libertarians and nationalists combined with far left types. The pirate parties were doomed since there was fundamental disagreement on every issue except not wanting to pay for movies.

I grew up in the pirate movement and my after action review is that the issues lost momentum with streaming services. The media became a lot more pro establishment. Julian Assange went from a hero in the media to a villain. 20 years ago the patriot act was seen as immoral by a lot of journalists. Today people who aren't pro military industrial complex are seen as Putin shills.

The pirate party ended up as a dumping ground for progressives that couldn't make it in the green party.

Did you mean to post this reply to the above comment? I think you meant it for Stefferi's post instead.

The financial future of streaming services may bring some negative surprises though, I guess.

Everything in the Rent-Aversion section prevents "literal rent-seeking" - if you mean abolishing improvement-based contract rents through some kind of decommodification of housing, no, but those aren't rents in the technical sense of the term. DBCFT is strange and radical despite its origins, but if you want private capital accumulation to take an increasingly marginal position in the economy while being practical and pro-growth about it, you want an SWF system. I didn't include that because I don't think I've ever heard rats discuss them. Regardless, it's not clear we could optimally hold a significant majority of all capital in passive funds (though we clearly can with a majority of publicly traded capital - we already do).

What is an SWF system?

Sovereign Wealth Funds. Picture Vanguard or Blackrock as independent agencies subsidiary to the treasury department. Distinct from traditional, dubiously reliable state trusts that notoriously ruined places like Nauru by being, essentially, market tracking index funds innately resistant to public choice pressures. They're a relatively novel public finance utility very popular among policy wonks with a lot of international experimentation and exploration. Ireland is establishing one now. Singapore and Norway each have SWF systems holding massive proportions of domestic capital and large stocks of foreign capital. There is however an ongoing question, coterminous with the debate over the effect of passive investing generally, as to how much of the economy can be in such funds before you (conceivably) take a productivity hit.

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