If you do discover some method to prove this proposal with the rigor of a bonafide mathematical proof then that may be promising but otherwise…
Yeah, voting theory probably has the level of mathematical rigour that would satisfy you. I suggest diving into the topic on your own time. The pattern of explanation is essentially: “We want a policy in the domain of interest (e.g. voting) to satisfy criteria C because it would be ridiculous to argue against that criteria for reasons X, Y, Z. Here’s a logical proof that policy P satisfies criteria C.”
I’m highly confident in such proposals when the assumptions of their logical argument are unobjectionable, and rightly so. Another example would be something like the relatively recent switch to a better kidney donation system.
But I wouldn’t constrain myself to such arguments. As I said,
Denying [that there are policies we can be confident in over the long term] would require you to think that no such policies exists. Which would commit you to say, “Hey, maybe the Saudi Arabian policy of cutting off a child-thief’s hand shouldn’t be revoked in 50 years. Who can say whether that’ll be a good policy at that point?” And to be honest, if morals do drift that much, I’m very okay with preventing them from acting on that. I think it’d be weird if you weren’t okay with that.
As of the time of writing, it’s a very small set of policies that I have this level of confidence in. So no, I don’t need to defend policies that I would never defend. I know that this strategy could be “misused” by my standards. I’m not defending that misuse. I’m merely saying, “This is a strategy that binds future governments to past agreements, and we can use the strategy to pass policies that we know to be good but have short-term consensus hurdles.” There’s a reason I’m sharing this on LessWrong rather than a forum that supports Trump. It’s because it gives us an advantage. Though, if all the comments are anything to go by, I can say that I disagree with almost all of you, so posting here was a probably a mistake.
Everyone arguing against this is acting like constitutions don’t exist, or that the constitution was a huge mistake. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous position. It reeks of isolated demands for rigour.
Yeah, voting theory probably has the level of mathematical rigour that would satisfy you. I suggest diving into the topic on your own time. The pattern of explanation is essentially: “We want a policy in the domain of interest (e.g. voting) to satisfy criteria C because it would be ridiculous to argue against that criteria for reasons X, Y, Z. Here’s a logical proof that policy P satisfies criteria C.”
I’m highly confident in such proposals when the assumptions of their logical argument are unobjectionable, and rightly so. Another example would be something like the relatively recent switch to a better kidney donation system.
But I wouldn’t constrain myself to such arguments. As I said,…
Did you intend to write down some other elaboration, or at least the beginning ideas of a possible proof, and forget?
Otherwise, how does this relate to my prior comment?
(Especially the second paragraph seems like musings regarding some different comment)
Oh, by “prove your proposal” I thought you were referring to the policies I would advocate for. Did you mean prove the enforcement perpetuities would work? In that case, it’s just a payoff matrix, and I’d have to show not reneging on the policy is the best course of action, which I’ve done in previous comments, but I’ll summarise it one last time.
And even then all it would take is a single digit number of judges and the top decision makers in the debt market to disagree in 50 years time and the effort will be negated.
I have been very clear, I am not advocating for unconstitutional policies, so judges can’t overturn it. If you can find a constitutional reason to overturn a 50-year-delayed land value tax, I’m all ears. Nobody as of yet has come up with an answer for that, and they keep avoiding that particular question, instead saying “Oh some policies are unconstitutional”, which again, is irrelevant to what my claims are. If you disagree with this, reread my previous comment.
So, overturning the land value tax would be solely up to the legislators. If the legislators renege on the policy, the debt is effectively a perpetuity. Meaning they have $1T worth of debt that they could have avoided (see the formula for valuing perpetuities). But what if they just don’t pay the debt? That is called a default, and defaults have serious negative consequences for a country.
Defaulting on $1T of debt, no matter how odd the conditions of that debt are, would significantly affect the credit-worthiness of a country. Saying otherwise is akin to a government claiming “Oh don’t worry, we’re just defaulting on the debt issued in 2023, the rest of our debt is safe”.
Let’s say you argue that “It’s not worth $1T at the time of default anyway because the market would assign some probability that the legislators would follow through the land value tax”. True, but irrelevant. It’s like if you bought a $1M lottery ticket and you won but they didn’t pay out. Is it true that “The ticket was never worth much anyway, so it doesn’t matter”? No, that logic doesn’t fly. You’d be very upset, and rightfully so.
So yeah, it’s either enact the policy, continue to pay the debt, or default and have huge negative ramifications for the country. The best outcome for the legislators is obviously to enact the land value tax. If you don’t agree with this, ask a finance professor; I’m not going to continue to try to change your mind.
I am not advocating for unconstitutional policies, so judges can’t overturn it.
That’s exactly what someone advocating for a 50 year delayed rule to make sure gay marriage is prohibited would have said, 50 years ago. It turns out that according to the only people who matter, yes he would have been advocating for unconstitutional policies.
Right, but I’m not arguing against gay marriage. Again if you can explain how land value taxes are unconstitutional, I’m all for it. You’re saying “people can misclassify”. So? Tell me how I’ve misclassified it as constitutional, even potentially. If you’re going to duck my actual question yet again, I’m not interested in discussing further.
The way you’ve “misclassified” it is that the court can say anything they want, and anything you say that disagrees with the court is, by the standards “who has the guns and enforces the rules”, misclassification.
You’re not debating the court in a truth-seeking process where you get to win if you can show flaws in their arguments. It doesn’t matter exactly what the court’s reasoning is, since they are a court and you’re not, and what they say goes. They just say it’s unconstitutional, post some decision that I’m sure you’ll disagree with, and voila, it’s unconstitutional.
Your argument is too powerful. And by that, I mean it classifies all policy arguments as dumb. “Oh you want to do X? Well the whole system is screwed up, so you’re naïve for even suggesting it.” Substitute any policy that could conceivably involve the courts for X. That’s your argument. If your arguments can’t delineate between good and bad ideas, your arguments have no value.
Yes, this is something that the court can do to any policy. If you’ll notice, high profile Supreme Court decisions are supposedly decided based on the Constitution, but actually depend on the political affiliations of the judges. It’s already happening.
That doesn’t mean that the system is completely screwed up, that means that the system is screwed up for any politically significant policy that the court wants to overthrow. You shouldn’t ask yourself if the policy violates the Constitution; you should ask yourself if the policy is politically significant. If it is, whether the court lets it through depends on politics, not on the Constitution.
In the specific case of decisions many years in the future, the fact that the political landscape changes after so many years makes it more likely that the court’s decision will be screwed up than if you just went to court today.
The type of law my proposal falls under is legislation. So you should give an example in the last 100 years where the supreme court invalidated legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution. (Roe vs Wade not being an example, because it’s not legislation.)
Or concede that the supreme court hasn’t overturned legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution in the last 100 years, and then point to any constitutional reason the court could give for overturning the specific policy I’ve advocated for (land value tax with a delay and a debt).
I explicitly asked for “legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution”, because that’s what’s actually relevant here. Then you bring up legislation that was struck down based off the 14th amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses.
Have you got any examples that actually meet the specified criteria (i.e. within the last 100 years, laws that are legislation, that were struck down by the supreme court without even a tenuous reference to the constitution)? If you don’t have any examples, then you need to concede that point, and then reference any places in the constitution that could, even unfairly, be used to invalidate my specific proposal (land value tax).
I explicitly asked for “legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution”, because that’s what’s actually relevant here. Then you bring up legislation that was struck down based off the 14th amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses.
One prominent method by which the courts overturn things is by stretching and twisting the Constitution to cover the thing they want to overturn. It’s going to “have something to do with the Constitution” after the fact, even if it didn’t before.
I’m pretty sure that if you had described the Defense of Marriage Act 50 years before the fact to just about any judge or lawyer, they’d have said it had nothing to do with the Constitution, just like a land tax.
Then surely you can twist some part of the constitution to find some relevance to land value taxes as I’ve proposed them. If you can, then credit where credit’s due, you have a point worth considering. If you can’t, then your concerns seem a lot less plausible.
Also, do you concede you were wrong about the U.S. not taking on $1T of debt? Because it seems like you’re really confident about things that you shouldn’t be confident about. Like, stuff that a simple google search would disconfirm. I suspect you have a real problem admitting error. In our other conversation, you totally just Smoke Bombed without so much as a “Oh, my bad”.
Then surely you can twist some part of the constitution to find some relevance to land value taxes as I’ve proposed them.
It’s not hard. “Reducing the value of the land is illegal as an uncompensated taking” or “this tax is unconstitutional because it violates the rule about direct taxes” (twisting the definition of direct tax so they can include it, of course) or even just due process because if the tax is instituted, the owner has no way to contest it.
You could say “those arguments are obviously wrong, so they don’t count”. You could say “they don’t apply those arguments in other situations—that’s special pleading and sophistry”. But it doesn’t matter how good or bad the Constitutional arguments are, only that a court would make them. And of course from our point of view 50 years in the past, they are obviously bad arguments to everyone, but 50 years in the past, Constitutional arguments about gay marriage were obviously bad too.
Also, do you concede you were wrong about the U.S. not taking on $1T of debt?
No. The national debt is 33T total, so 1T is a substantial portion of it. Nothing like that can, in practice, be put into place without a complete political realignment.
I’ll leave it to others to decide how plausible it is that the courts would make those arguments (especially when the post explicitly handles compensation). And it looks like I called it with your complete inability to accept error. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.
I have been very clear, I am not advocating for unconstitutional policies, so judges can’t overturn it. If you can find a constitutional reason to overturn a 50-year-delayed land value tax, I’m all ears.
Why do you believe judges of the future won’t be able to overturn it?
As a suggestion, being fixated on ‘constitutional reason’ is detrimental.
The judgement opinions of the court don’t need to be backed by any solid reasoning at all, let alone ‘constitutional’, sometimes even literally self-contradicting reasoning is used, and nonetheless they are still carried out.
ChatGPT4, which passed the bar exam, says you’re wrong and that U.S. judges cannot overturn laws unless they are unconstitutional. This was my understanding. Speak to a legal professor, and see who’s right here. There’s no point discussing further until you do that.
ChatGPT says you’re wrong and that U.S. judges cannot overturn laws unless they are unconstitutional. This was my understanding. Speak to a legal professor, and see who’s right here. There’s no point discussing further until you do that.
Is this a joke?
If it’s not, referencing ‘ChatGPT’ to answer a question regarding a quoted section of your own previous comment is too bizarre for me to make heads or tails of.
At least, I’m assuming you wrote that prior comment?
EDIT: Since you appear to have added a claim that ‘ChatGPT’ ‘passed the bar exam’, could you please link the source? This is surprising news.
Huh that’s interesting, though in this case it’s clearly incorrect, the supreme court can obviously negate existing laws, previous judgements, etc… regardless of what you may think counts as ‘unconstitutional’, often even regardless of what eminent law professors may think.
Trying to rely on something that you don’t know enough to verify is not wise.
Anyways, do you want to exit the conversation and let ChatGPT continue if it’s not a joke?
I don’t quite see the rationale otherwise for taking it seriously.
Why should I take your legal claims more seriously than something that can pass the bar exam, when you’re unable to? If you still don’t like that source, you could have googled my claim and found that you’re incorrect:
Why should I take your legal claims more seriously than something that can pass the bar exam, when you’re unable to? If you still don’t like that source, you could have googled my claim and found that you’re incorrect:
Okay if this is not written by ChatGPT, then I would recommend you to actually review records of the court, since they are publicly accessible online. The opinions are mostly written in normal college level English so you should be fine in comprehension with some focused effort.
If you are using ChatGPT in comments then the LW norm is to explicitly state it. And definitely don’t take recommendations from it to the extent of using simple google queries as ‘proof’ of some kind. It’s really detrimental to your account’s credibility.
And I am following that norm. Mentioning the word “ChatGPT” is not cause for suspicion. I suggest you don’t accuse people on such flimsy evidence. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.
Edit: To Habryka, I didn’t “Miss the point”. I’m just not going to engage with someone this rude:
The opinions are mostly written in normal college level English so you should be fine in comprehension with some focused effort
Pretending to be smarter than me is a bit rich when the guy posted a question asking whether babies without brains have consciousness, and the very topic he’s trying to school me on is one in which he doesn’t know basic facts like why the constitutionality of a law was relevant to my argument.
I noticed, incidentally via a search, this substantial edit of a brief reply to me, that was politely ignored 5 months ago, and how oddly aggressive the edit sounds.
If your genuinely writing out these comments yourself and not relying on ChatGPT, I’ll be kind and clarify why this misses the point.
Linking a question somewhere else on LW, and it’s completely different topic, does not demonstrate anything of my intelligence or your intelligence or ‘constitutionality of a law’. It seems bizarre to try to connect things this way.
Plus, even if the link was relevant, trying to use it at as proof of some relative measure of intelligent is inevitably going to backfire when written in such a manner, so there’s no reason to get so insecure about it.
Yeah, voting theory probably has the level of mathematical rigour that would satisfy you. I suggest diving into the topic on your own time. The pattern of explanation is essentially: “We want a policy in the domain of interest (e.g. voting) to satisfy criteria C because it would be ridiculous to argue against that criteria for reasons X, Y, Z. Here’s a logical proof that policy P satisfies criteria C.”
I’m highly confident in such proposals when the assumptions of their logical argument are unobjectionable, and rightly so. Another example would be something like the relatively recent switch to a better kidney donation system.
But I wouldn’t constrain myself to such arguments. As I said,
As of the time of writing, it’s a very small set of policies that I have this level of confidence in. So no, I don’t need to defend policies that I would never defend. I know that this strategy could be “misused” by my standards. I’m not defending that misuse. I’m merely saying, “This is a strategy that binds future governments to past agreements, and we can use the strategy to pass policies that we know to be good but have short-term consensus hurdles.” There’s a reason I’m sharing this on LessWrong rather than a forum that supports Trump. It’s because it gives us an advantage. Though, if all the comments are anything to go by, I can say that I disagree with almost all of you, so posting here was a probably a mistake.
Everyone arguing against this is acting like constitutions don’t exist, or that the constitution was a huge mistake. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous position. It reeks of isolated demands for rigour.
Did you intend to write down some other elaboration, or at least the beginning ideas of a possible proof, and forget?
Otherwise, how does this relate to my prior comment?
(Especially the second paragraph seems like musings regarding some different comment)
Oh, by “prove your proposal” I thought you were referring to the policies I would advocate for. Did you mean prove the enforcement perpetuities would work? In that case, it’s just a payoff matrix, and I’d have to show not reneging on the policy is the best course of action, which I’ve done in previous comments, but I’ll summarise it one last time.
I have been very clear, I am not advocating for unconstitutional policies, so judges can’t overturn it. If you can find a constitutional reason to overturn a 50-year-delayed land value tax, I’m all ears. Nobody as of yet has come up with an answer for that, and they keep avoiding that particular question, instead saying “Oh some policies are unconstitutional”, which again, is irrelevant to what my claims are. If you disagree with this, reread my previous comment.
So, overturning the land value tax would be solely up to the legislators. If the legislators renege on the policy, the debt is effectively a perpetuity. Meaning they have $1T worth of debt that they could have avoided (see the formula for valuing perpetuities). But what if they just don’t pay the debt? That is called a default, and defaults have serious negative consequences for a country.
Defaulting on $1T of debt, no matter how odd the conditions of that debt are, would significantly affect the credit-worthiness of a country. Saying otherwise is akin to a government claiming “Oh don’t worry, we’re just defaulting on the debt issued in 2023, the rest of our debt is safe”.
Let’s say you argue that “It’s not worth $1T at the time of default anyway because the market would assign some probability that the legislators would follow through the land value tax”. True, but irrelevant. It’s like if you bought a $1M lottery ticket and you won but they didn’t pay out. Is it true that “The ticket was never worth much anyway, so it doesn’t matter”? No, that logic doesn’t fly. You’d be very upset, and rightfully so.
So yeah, it’s either enact the policy, continue to pay the debt, or default and have huge negative ramifications for the country. The best outcome for the legislators is obviously to enact the land value tax. If you don’t agree with this, ask a finance professor; I’m not going to continue to try to change your mind.
That’s exactly what someone advocating for a 50 year delayed rule to make sure gay marriage is prohibited would have said, 50 years ago. It turns out that according to the only people who matter, yes he would have been advocating for unconstitutional policies.
Right, but I’m not arguing against gay marriage. Again if you can explain how land value taxes are unconstitutional, I’m all for it. You’re saying “people can misclassify”. So? Tell me how I’ve misclassified it as constitutional, even potentially. If you’re going to duck my actual question yet again, I’m not interested in discussing further.
The way you’ve “misclassified” it is that the court can say anything they want, and anything you say that disagrees with the court is, by the standards “who has the guns and enforces the rules”, misclassification.
You’re not debating the court in a truth-seeking process where you get to win if you can show flaws in their arguments. It doesn’t matter exactly what the court’s reasoning is, since they are a court and you’re not, and what they say goes. They just say it’s unconstitutional, post some decision that I’m sure you’ll disagree with, and voila, it’s unconstitutional.
Your argument is too powerful. And by that, I mean it classifies all policy arguments as dumb. “Oh you want to do X? Well the whole system is screwed up, so you’re naïve for even suggesting it.” Substitute any policy that could conceivably involve the courts for X. That’s your argument. If your arguments can’t delineate between good and bad ideas, your arguments have no value.
Yes, this is something that the court can do to any policy. If you’ll notice, high profile Supreme Court decisions are supposedly decided based on the Constitution, but actually depend on the political affiliations of the judges. It’s already happening.
That doesn’t mean that the system is completely screwed up, that means that the system is screwed up for any politically significant policy that the court wants to overthrow. You shouldn’t ask yourself if the policy violates the Constitution; you should ask yourself if the policy is politically significant. If it is, whether the court lets it through depends on politics, not on the Constitution.
In the specific case of decisions many years in the future, the fact that the political landscape changes after so many years makes it more likely that the court’s decision will be screwed up than if you just went to court today.
The type of law my proposal falls under is legislation. So you should give an example in the last 100 years where the supreme court invalidated legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution. (Roe vs Wade not being an example, because it’s not legislation.)
Or concede that the supreme court hasn’t overturned legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution in the last 100 years, and then point to any constitutional reason the court could give for overturning the specific policy I’ve advocated for (land value tax with a delay and a debt).
The Defense of Marriage act was legislation.
I explicitly asked for “legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution”, because that’s what’s actually relevant here. Then you bring up legislation that was struck down based off the 14th amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses.
Have you got any examples that actually meet the specified criteria (i.e. within the last 100 years, laws that are legislation, that were struck down by the supreme court without even a tenuous reference to the constitution)? If you don’t have any examples, then you need to concede that point, and then reference any places in the constitution that could, even unfairly, be used to invalidate my specific proposal (land value tax).
One prominent method by which the courts overturn things is by stretching and twisting the Constitution to cover the thing they want to overturn. It’s going to “have something to do with the Constitution” after the fact, even if it didn’t before.
I’m pretty sure that if you had described the Defense of Marriage Act 50 years before the fact to just about any judge or lawyer, they’d have said it had nothing to do with the Constitution, just like a land tax.
Then surely you can twist some part of the constitution to find some relevance to land value taxes as I’ve proposed them. If you can, then credit where credit’s due, you have a point worth considering. If you can’t, then your concerns seem a lot less plausible.
Also, do you concede you were wrong about the U.S. not taking on $1T of debt? Because it seems like you’re really confident about things that you shouldn’t be confident about. Like, stuff that a simple google search would disconfirm. I suspect you have a real problem admitting error. In our other conversation, you totally just Smoke Bombed without so much as a “Oh, my bad”.
It’s not hard. “Reducing the value of the land is illegal as an uncompensated taking” or “this tax is unconstitutional because it violates the rule about direct taxes” (twisting the definition of direct tax so they can include it, of course) or even just due process because if the tax is instituted, the owner has no way to contest it.
You could say “those arguments are obviously wrong, so they don’t count”. You could say “they don’t apply those arguments in other situations—that’s special pleading and sophistry”. But it doesn’t matter how good or bad the Constitutional arguments are, only that a court would make them. And of course from our point of view 50 years in the past, they are obviously bad arguments to everyone, but 50 years in the past, Constitutional arguments about gay marriage were obviously bad too.
No. The national debt is 33T total, so 1T is a substantial portion of it. Nothing like that can, in practice, be put into place without a complete political realignment.
I’ll leave it to others to decide how plausible it is that the courts would make those arguments (especially when the post explicitly handles compensation). And it looks like I called it with your complete inability to accept error. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.
Why do you believe judges of the future won’t be able to overturn it?
As a suggestion, being fixated on ‘constitutional reason’ is detrimental.
The judgement opinions of the court don’t need to be backed by any solid reasoning at all, let alone ‘constitutional’, sometimes even literally self-contradicting reasoning is used, and nonetheless they are still carried out.
ChatGPT4, which passed the bar exam, says you’re wrong and that U.S. judges cannot overturn laws unless they are unconstitutional. This was my understanding. Speak to a legal professor, and see who’s right here. There’s no point discussing further until you do that.
Is this a joke?
If it’s not, referencing ‘ChatGPT’ to answer a question regarding a quoted section of your own previous comment is too bizarre for me to make heads or tails of.
At least, I’m assuming you wrote that prior comment?
EDIT: Since you appear to have added a claim that ‘ChatGPT’ ‘passed the bar exam’, could you please link the source? This is surprising news.
Yeah, it’s pretty crazy hey.
https://law.stanford.edu/2023/04/19/gpt-4-passes-the-bar-exam-what-that-means-for-artificial-intelligence-tools-in-the-legal-industry/
Huh that’s interesting, though in this case it’s clearly incorrect, the supreme court can obviously negate existing laws, previous judgements, etc… regardless of what you may think counts as ‘unconstitutional’, often even regardless of what eminent law professors may think.
Trying to rely on something that you don’t know enough to verify is not wise.
Anyways, do you want to exit the conversation and let ChatGPT continue if it’s not a joke?
I don’t quite see the rationale otherwise for taking it seriously.
Why should I take your legal claims more seriously than something that can pass the bar exam, when you’re unable to? If you still don’t like that source, you could have googled my claim and found that you’re incorrect:
https://www.google.com/search?q=U.S.+judges+cannot+overturn+laws+unless+they+are+unconstitutional
Okay if this is not written by ChatGPT, then I would recommend you to actually review records of the court, since they are publicly accessible online. The opinions are mostly written in normal college level English so you should be fine in comprehension with some focused effort.
Or you can read some well respected analysis for non-experts, such as SCOTUSblog: https://www.scotusblog.com/
This will probably resolve your confusion.
If you are using ChatGPT in comments then the LW norm is to explicitly state it. And definitely don’t take recommendations from it to the extent of using simple google queries as ‘proof’ of some kind. It’s really detrimental to your account’s credibility.
And I am following that norm. Mentioning the word “ChatGPT” is not cause for suspicion. I suggest you don’t accuse people on such flimsy evidence. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.
Edit: To Habryka, I didn’t “Miss the point”. I’m just not going to engage with someone this rude:
Pretending to be smarter than me is a bit rich when the guy posted a question asking whether babies without brains have consciousness, and the very topic he’s trying to school me on is one in which he doesn’t know basic facts like why the constitutionality of a law was relevant to my argument.
I noticed, incidentally via a search, this substantial edit of a brief reply to me, that was politely ignored 5 months ago, and how oddly aggressive the edit sounds.
If your genuinely writing out these comments yourself and not relying on ChatGPT, I’ll be kind and clarify why this misses the point.
Linking a question somewhere else on LW, and it’s completely different topic, does not demonstrate anything of my intelligence or your intelligence or ‘constitutionality of a law’. It seems bizarre to try to connect things this way.
Plus, even if the link was relevant, trying to use it at as proof of some relative measure of intelligent is inevitably going to backfire when written in such a manner, so there’s no reason to get so insecure about it.