Meanwhile we bail out large corporations on mere speculation they might fail. I don't know where you live, but around me a large chunk of the population have nothing to fail down to other than homelessness which is a huge drag upon the economy.
In the UK at least the biggest portion of welfare goes to the state pension.
It’s hard to deal with that when people have been paying into the system for their whole working lives on the promise that they will be looked after in old age.
It’s hard to see how you can fix this whilst pensioners continue to vote whilst young people don’t.
>It’s hard to deal with that when people have been paying into the system for their whole working lives on the promise that they will be looked after in old age.
They weren't paying "into the system". They were being taxed.
Treat it for what it was, and stop feeding the pyramid scheme.
That's about 25% of UK government spending. 33% if you include pensions.
The UK does have an issue with a lowering number of people in productive work and ever more on various kinds of disability payout, it's true, but this -
If education is welfare then so is everything. Defence is welfare becuase before you might have to hire private security. Police and fire serviecs are welfare because they used to be private. etc....
Ok so can you name me a single piece of government spending that isn't welfare Or are you advocating for governments to just cease existing all together.
The answer is the ultra-wealthy. Those on welfare are getting increasingly poor, while the ultra-wealthy are getting increasingly wealthy. It's clear where the money is going, and it's not to poor people.
> political pressure. Same reason lots of stuff is banned in the EU even when it's safer than other things that aren't banned.
You avoid the question instead of answering it (What caused that "political pressure"? Does such a thing just occur randomly in nature?), following it by an assertion that you don't bother to provide any evidence for.
I believe the EU tends to follow a precautionary principle, namely a substance generally must be shown to be safe before it’s approved. In contrast, the US follows a risk-based approach where a substance can often be used unless it’s shown to be harmful. So it isn't really that many "safe" things in the EU are banned, rather they have not been approved. Pretty sure this is specific to food additives, though may apply to other areas.
>Real estate(the land, not the mansion) is a really good long term storage of wealth as it is fixed, finite, and doesn't depreciate in value except through market trend and it basically only go up as long as the economy itself grow.
None of this is true.
Step by step:
>as it is fixed
Something not being able to be moved is a negative, not a positive
>finite
New land is created all the time. The netherlands has created an entire new province.
> and doesn't depreciate in value
Only true legally. I can assure you land does depreciate, as can any farmer that has used it to farm the same crop for years and now finds its yields reduced as a result.
>except through market trend
So, just like any other asset?
> it basically only go up as long as the economy itself grow.
Untrue, simply check any number of rural areas that have had the life drained out of them over the past 50 years.
Land is useful, but let's not pretend like it's something it isn't.
>You're 'technically correct' but the total amount of land being created is so small as to be meaningless in a global sense.
By that argument we don't even need to create any land at all. There is plenty of empty or nearly empty land all over the world. It may not be as desirable as specific places, but i can assure you the cost to make large swathes of land inhabitable by humans is comparatively low.
Land not depreciating is true, because unlike capital, it doesn't suffer entropy for all intent and purpose. Compare that to a car, which is forever basically a depreciating asset.
Also, Netherland did not create land, because ocean is a type of land. They merely improve the land to the point that it can be used by people walking around, but that also preclude the ocean to be used by other means such as aquaculture and building coral reefs which can be used to provide ecosystem services and sustenance to humans.
New startup idea: landhacking. We disrupt the earth's surface itself by simply building land under or above the existing land. The new land will be fully non-fungible, powered by blockchain and AI. We're so sure this will work, we're taking pre-orders for parcels of hacked land already!
>There's literally 0 startups I've been part of where data protection laws or even the infamous cookie banners have been anywhere near relevant (unless your business was literally profiling).
Yes, it is—gp’s point being we do that all the time and often agree that it makes sense.
A baby doesn’t catch a sex pest charge for running around naked, but it also can’t get a gun license. A mom-n-pop doesn’t have to hire an auditor and file with the SEC, but it also can’t sell shares of itself to the public.
Why? The bigger you are, the more responsibility you bear: the bigger the impact of your mistakes, the subtler the complexities of your operation, the greater your sophistication relative to individual customers/citizens—and the greater your relative capacity to self-regulate.
But the conditions aren't here to annoy big companies but because we want to shape society in a specific way. Why would I allow small companies to disrespct author rights and steal, or gather more private information about citizens?
The problem is that an intellectually consistent position of being against "different rules for different people" means everywhere, in everything.
For instance, poor people should not have any tax breaks: everyone should pay exactly the same percentage of their income, like 15% all across the board or whatever.
Such ideas often have regressive effects.
However, I get it. When it comes to handling personal information, you simply can't say that the "little guys" don't have to follow all the rules, and can cheerfully mishandle personal information in some way.
Small operators have simpler structures and information systems; it should be easier for them to comply and show compliance, you would think (and maybe some of the requirements in the area can be simplified rather than rules waived.)
Almost any corporate rule I am aware of has differences in how they apply depending on the size of the company. And as an entrepreneur and startup consultant I think that is a good principle. I don’t even see how society could function without it.
In almost every developed country the rules are exactly the same. No hairnet, no licence? Lemonade Stand Ltd can and will be shut down. The main difference is lenience in punishment which tends to tail off and disappear at the lemonade stand scale, and be stricter for large multinationals.
Seen house building regulations recently? Most countries will let the home owner do things they'd never let a contractor do without a permit. There's a lot of different laws for home or very small scale selling of various goods, brewing, canning, single person doing business as companies, etc.
But in this analogy, we aren’t talking about a person doing coding at home only for their own use, are we? Isn’t this about small companies - I.e. whether there should be different applicable laws if you hire a small construction company vs a large one to rewire your kitchen, etc?
I'm not sure how you got to this conclusion. The answer is a simple google away: smaller companies face lower taxes, lower standards of documentation on health & safety, don't need work councils, less reporting on workspace/financials, etc etc etc.
My point is these societies have the rule of law, and the vast majority of laws don't have a "unless you have 50 employees or less" or "unless your revenue is under $1 mil" qualifier. The difference in treatment is often a complex precedent of leniency in enforcement or punishment, but ultimately the rules are the same for everyone, even if you have to upset the 8 year old selling lemonade.
I think most people agree that the state should be subject to harsher rules than you are, because it is large and powerful.
But you would actually prefer to be subject to the same rules as the state? I.e. typically nothing which isn't explicitly allowed is forbidden for you to do, you are forced to hand out copies of documents you produce, and so on?
That’s how efficient market works. The bigger are the players, the higher are the chances they will distort the market. You need to apply the force proportional to size to return market back to equilibrium at maximum performance. We have anti-trust laws for this reason, so nothing new, nothing special.
It could, however, be good policy independent of personal preference.
I like folks who have to work for a living and dislike billionaires relaxing on yachts bought on their generational wealth, but in addition sociology metrics of the United States in the past 100 years suggest that the highest levels of happiness correlated pretty heavily with marginal tax rates as high as 100% based on wealth.
Compliance has fixed costs. And smaller operations have a smaller blast radius when things go wrong. Reducing requirements for smaller operators makes sense.
The answer is welfare. That is the original sin of all of this, and the one people refuse to acknowledge.
You need to let people fail.
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