So in other words, the free market has produced a pile of jobs that we don't really need? Lobbyists get paid money to get politicians to supply a deduction as a line item on some obscure form, which increases red tape, which requires a need for a free market service, the revenue from that service in turn goes to feed more lobbying for more red tape. This is basically collusion, using the worst aspects of the free market and government, in simultaneous failures.
Meanwhile, the accounting and tax lay industry is part of the lobbying effort to grow their business on the back end, rather than making the case to the customer on the front end. It'd double dealing.
So I'm hardly sympathetic, but yes considering there are an ass tonne of jobs that would just vanish overnight, there'd maybe need to be a transitional phase, just avoid an abrupt change. But how do you shrink a market in a non-disruptive and fair way considering it grew in a distruptive and unfair way in the first place?
So in other words, the free market has produced a pile of jobs that we don't really need? Lobbyists get paid money to get politicians to supply a deduction as a line item on some obscure form
Politicians protecting an industry through action or inaction, no matter if its lobbyists or others suggesting that they do, isn't the free market.
The free market will necessarily reward a small number of winners way out of proportion to everyone else. These companies will have a much larger lobbying war chest. Stuff like this is not somehow a betrayal of market principles, but the perfectly predictable result.
It is all very well excluding corporate lobbying from your scholastic definition of a free market. Such a market will never exist anywhere for more than five minutes.
I think the implication is that countries that espouse their "free market"-ness end up with a lot of regulatory capture. This, telecoms, healthcare.
A bunch of people with a lot of money have been able to lock in their positions. It sure feels like pulling out of the church of laissez-faire economics would let us, say, pass laws with things like price controls (or just nationalizing the whole industry!).
An aside: complicated taxes aren't the opposite of "free market". For example, giving tax incentives to new companies can help make a market more free by reducing the cost of entry.
Sorry, you're never going to have a society where the government is a 100% neutral referee and everybody else is a part of the 'free market'. As long as there is an incentive to rig the game, people are gonna rig it.
Housing is very far from free market, from zoning regulations to building codes to property taxes and school districts to rental regulations. Banking is also pretty much the opposite of it, from the Federal Reserve dependency to Fannie and Freddie loan guarantees.
Fair, but both are significantly more free than others.
Rent is not really heavily regulated outside of California and New York. Similarly, banking is indeed regulated in specific sectors, but not really across the board
It might be helpful to think of "free market" as a scale instead of an absolute definition. Level one free market: socialism, where people were still using money from a salary to buy everyday goods from people-owned "enterprises". Level ten free market: you buy protection at market rates or someone takes away your sandwich, if the protection takes the sandwich don't buy from the same vendor again.
I imagine discussing relative merits within the range of roughly level four to level eight would be far more fruitful than the usual "my free market is tougher than your free market" posturing.
Why shouldn't they have to adapt to rapid changes in the "free" market like we do? Notice it wasn't called anything like the "dot-com gradual-and-not-too-painful realignment." Why the special consideration for tax people? I mean, if we're going to vaunt the free market, let's let it splash everybody, not just the little guys.
I think that we have a cultural problem. People chose to take out loans for their tertiary education because of our beliefs in the tertiary educational system. College is to get a job, but we believe it's there for us to "discover ourselves." And that's how we end up with accountants.
Sometimes I wish there was some website where non-partisan smart people scientifically identified the current problems and come up with a finite, exhaustive list of possible problems. And then, determine the amount of money it would take to test a hypothesis. If they do and it fails, then they must take into account that hypothesis and correct for it.
How much money would need to be raised?
It's just too bad that I've never encountered anyone in real life that thinks like this. It feels so intuitive when you approach it like a computer problem.
I think the problem is that that political science is paradoxical in itself and goes against on of the most important tenets of science and reason: that we must give up our beliefs if the evidence proves them wrong.
Is there anyone out there who is balanced enough to actually be bipartisan? How would one search for such a unicorn? Is it really impossible?
Such a list isn't possible because of differing interpretations of reality and basic facts and differing interpretations of what even constitutes a problem.
