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What do you happen to consider as desirable yet obscure policy proposals?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SCqRu6shoa8ySvRAa/big-list-of-cause-candidates#1__Better_Political_Systems_and_Policy_Making
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There's a lot of ways to answer that question depending on how high the obscurity threshold is, how I should treat relatively unknown and unlikely to be enacted proposals that seem creative and intriguing but I am personally too small-c conservative for, how uncertainty of outcomes plays into meta-political reforms, etc.
In congress there are plenty of reforms that can amount to minor adjustments in procedural rules - roll-over appropriations, default appointee approval, open election for house steering committee positions - but which range from merely major to a potential sea change in functionality, and they have changed before. Hard to judge but underrated either way. A big legislative change I think would be great but will never happen is for them to adopt SCOTUS' ban on any media or deliberative leaks save audio recordings of special hearings/oral args
For huge, can't-hate-it, won't-buy-it proposals: (1) Martin Bailey had a mechanism for baking something like Kaldor-Hicks transfers into the lawmaking process with an "insurance for proposed law" system, as well as "competing" bicameral chambers compensated proportionally to the long run economic benefits of their chamber's legislation. (2) Glen Weyl's Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, which you might have heard of. Not every day an economist figures out how to abolish property efficiently. (3) Replacing subnational government with federally granted charters to private, self-legislating firms collecting (but ultimately not capturing) all land rents in a metropolitan area. Lot to dig into on that, might write it up in full at some point.
One approach I think is very underappreciated is exploiting money illusion and loss aversion in policy structuring: Don't tax people and then pay them in retirement based on (a crude function of) their payments, require an (ideally pseudo-) "mandatory savings account" with the state. Don't give people negative income taxes that they feel bad about getting and worse about losing, give everyone a UBI and subject everyone to progressive payroll taxes (the same ones later filling those savings accounts? At least with expensing of savings to make it consumption based ofc) so it always feels like it's "there" even though these policies are identical in accounting terms.
Things I more or less like off the top of my head, more or less obscure, a few might just be personal preferences:
Perpetually extending daylight savings,
granting special academy-and-service visas to under-15's that score in the global 1% on state department administered tests
congressional apportionment by citizen count instead of population
75 year age ceiling for electoral candidacy
Ceasing legal recognition of dual citizenship
Stagger drinking ages by ABV
German style vocational selection
Euro style law & med training
Repealing the disparate impact language in the '91 CRA
Rollback DoT CAFE regs
Privatize ATCs
Independently maintained, dynamic pattern books for purposes of public beauty
Experimentation and choice in criminal sentencing.
6 Year single presidential terms
3 or 4 year house terms
Returning carbon tax revenues to everyone in a direct flat transfer (only real solution to how bad they effect low-income household consumption via gas inelasticity)
State assimilation of municipal LEO orgs and the establishment of state police academies modeled after service academies
Elect city councils at-large and through citizen's assemblies hearing from relevant experts (turnout is way to low and wards are functionally a gerrymandering mechanism)
I'm sure there's more. Honestly a transition to a tax/transfer system based in negative externalities, some negative internalities, non-Schumpeterian rents, passive funds, and (whatever remaining) progressive consumption through not-even-thought-about payroll, that ideally flows into provident accounts, with social insurance and automatic public banking for UBI...that would be my contented zone.
I'm not sure if this would work without causing havoc in real property, but I've thought for a long time that this approach should be utilized with intellectual property. Allow the creator a grace period of, say, five years under current rules, then you'll be under this scheme, though with an option to release to public domain at any time.
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How would it work when the supply of land zoned for residences is inelastic? What stops a large investment fund from buying everything in a prime location, doubling the declared price and leasing the properties back to their owners? Yes, theoretically people could coordinate and wait it out, but good luck doing that in practice.
In such a case we are talking about incumbent landholders who did not assess their property as high as it is theoretically worth because they did not wish to pay higher taxes. The purchasing firm will take a relative loss in cash flow by setting it at that higher assessment (and remember, higher land taxes are not passed on to tenants, so even if the old residents move back in their rents will just be their previously unrealized imputed rent) and are presumably willing to do so because they believe they can make more money than the previous incumbents even given higher taxes, which requires some kind of productive change in property use, which entails more efficient allocation, which is largely the point of COST. In any case, it's interesting many of the critiques of Radical Markets take the form of "what if rich people buy out xyz?" when it is not clear what it even means to be a rich person in such an economy, when they don't own anything in the traditional sense of the term.
They didn't want to pay higher taxes because they lived on it and didn't derive any profit from it beyond living close to their workplace.
For a more concrete example, let's say there's a large factory and a town that is mostly settled by people who work for this factory or provide services to the workers. All the land around the factory is zoned for agriculture. Every house is owned by its residents, is worth $100K and everyone pays $1K in property taxes.
Company X buys every piece of residential property in the town for 100K, sets the new valuation at 300K and offers to rent them back to the former owners for $13K a year, with every house paying them $10K a year, 10 years to break even
The owners have three options:
Option 3 sounds like a perfectly rational way to punish Company X for trying to squeeze, but this depends on coordination between the former homeowners. If one third choose option 1, Company X immediately breaks even and can sell the rest at any price. If one quarter chooses option 2, Company X will not be losing money on this venture and can slowly deal with the rest of the homeowners. And if rezoning is hard or impossible, it's not even an option.
And what's worse, none of the options actually improve the productivity of the properties.
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I think the first answer is "zoning reform". If it was as trivially easy to spam new housing as YIMBYs would like it to be, a would-be monopolist would be chasing an ever-moving target.
I think the second answer is that even in the current environment, there is a lot of land. It would take absolutely insane levels of invested capital to build a portfolio that has anything approaching market power. Very localized market power would hopefully be mitigated by (1), as you can just go down the street some number of miles and build more, but the option to move to the next city is a pretty decent escape from monopoly. We've already seen plenty of less-than-super-money-loaded (i.e., not tech) companies flee from the high costs in California locations (just due to NIMBY, not even self-assessed-tax-derived monopoly). It definitely requires them to take a one-time hit, but these are the forces that move the system toward equilibrium.
I think the third answer is that the homeowner should, in theory, assess their property at a value that would actually sufficiently compensate them for the move. That is, it should include their moving costs, the cost of an alternate home in an alternate location, and whatever inconveniences come with that alternative. This is, of course, in theory, and it would be quite difficult to assess in practice. If done appropriately, it would be paired with significant reduction in tax rates, as valuations would be significantly higher than current purchase prices. Of course, Weyl's ilk aren't actually motivated by assessing things properly, so they'll immediately defect and jack rates up to be punitive toward anyone with wealth/assets. This is the real reason why such a scheme is not feasible; there is no likely political commitment to using this tool in a way that would actually be beneficial to a market economy rather than highly detrimental. I'd be much much much more concerned about this than investment company monopoly.
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