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0 pointsip263y ago0 comments

Agreed; I figure the necessary missing piece is government dampening this effect. Some way or another, to balance it out you need to “leak” capital faster & faster as you accumulate it. The size of the leak would be tuned to allow you to continue to grow your wealth if you are still rapidly creating new wealth, but if you just sit on a kings ransom in safe investments, it would leak away & attenuate.

Trouble being, this most likely takes the form of steeply rising taxes, which are ever-unpopular, and needs careful design. I also suspect just about everybody aspires to “make it” and then stop striving; this is somewhat antithetical to that (although the leak would be tiny at regular-people levels of wealth)

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Applejinx3y ago

From what experimentation I've done it doesn't take much of a leak. I'm agreed too except that in the absence of us or somebody fixing it, the whole thing is going to blow up.

Dark ages are a thing. It's not at all guaranteed that you can preside over an injustice engine of this nature and have it persist at all: externalities will bite you.

I guess the follow-up is, 'given that this is going to blow up, how hard of a landing do you want? Do you want an apocalyptically ruined planet, or heads on pikes, or massive asset seizure, or all of the above in various combinations?'

dclowd99013y ago

IMO, owning a second property should be just as expensive in taxes as it needs to be to not be profitable to own one as an investment property, in the short and long term. That way people can _have_ second properties, but it's going to cost them, and they can choose to accept the cost or not. A yearly 5% tax on the property value should just about do it.

We need to start treating housing as a vital resource, not an investment, and rationing it.

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