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.
FCCC
Karma: 43
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”.
Let me put it this way, I don’t think it was sarcasm.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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:
It is not possible for the debt to be anywhere near 1T because the government is going to refuse to get into debts that high, not because the number is not mathematically possible.
You’re really not doing yourself any favours by claiming that the U.S. would never take on $1T of debt. It’s currently $33T, and they need to continually roll over expiring debt. (Not to mention the fact that the exact number, $1T, plays no role in my argument whatsoever other than “big number that the government would not want to pay”.)
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.
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.
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.
It reflects poorly on someone when they don’t concede points that they’re wrong about. For instance, “It’s not possible for the debt to be anywhere near 1T.” It is wild how overconfident you are. The perpetuity formula is taught in most finance 101 classes.
Your understanding of debt and defaults is equally poor.
As I said, I’m a finance professional, but you don’t have to take my word for whether these assets would create the right incentives. Go to your local university, and ask finance professors about it. Don’t make the judgement yourself, because you lack really basic knowledge of finance. Until you do that, there’s no point to this conversation.
I think your point is that this strategy only works if the voting block’s short-term interests conflict and their long-term interests don’t conflict. I fully agree with that.
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.
I’ve given you quite a lot of thorough explanation as to why that position is wrong. I don’t think there’s any point discussing further.
Why are you ignoring my actual point?
That underlying point still stands: We should be confident that changing the electoral system is good, no matter what the future holds. Or rather, that we should be as confident as we can be about any policy change.
Since society can change a lot in 50 years, this issue could very well be, in 2073, the equivalent of trying to make gay marriage illegal today.
I am confident that you don’t know much about land value taxes. I don’t think you wouldn’t make this claim if you did. From a broad theoretical perspective, they’re sound, though I’m not 100% sold on some implementation details. But as I said in the earlier article, “the examples I’ve given are simply for clarity”. I probably should have restated that here.
To give you an actual example of a policy that I’m 100% certain of, take changing the electoral voting system from First-Past-The-Post to any number of decent alternatives.
You’re asking a very similar question as someone in my other post.
The fact that I claim to know that a small set of very well-justified policies will be good in 50 years is not overconfidence on my part; it’s just I’ve written quite extensively on optimal policy methodology. Have a read here, The Benevolent Ruler’s Handbook (Part 1): The Policy Problem.
A good question someone else asked was, “Fifty years ago, what policies would you have advocated for?” Well, we didn’t have a theoretical foundation for optimal policy at that point. Given that, there is no policy I would have tried to have advocated for in this way (even though the land value tax was invented before 1879). The article that I linked you to contains my attempt to lay those theoretical foundations (or the start of it anyway, I haven’t finished it yet).
Once you have these foundations, you can say things like “I know this policy is optimal, and will continue to be so”. Moral drift is irrelevant for such policies. I’m not arguing for a policy against something like polyamory, just because it’s weird by today’s standards. There are policies that we can be extremely confident in.
Why is it that mathematicians are confident about their results? It’s evident that they are highly confident. And it’s evident that they’re justified in being confident. Their results literally hold for the rest of time. They’re not going to flip in 100 years. So why is this the case?
Basically, there are a few stages of belief. Sometimes a belief is stated on its own without anything else. Sometimes a justification is given for that belief. And sometimes it’s explained why that justification is a reliable indicator of truth. Now, you may think you have infinite regress here, but that’s wrong in practice: You eventually reach a point where your justification is so trivially obvious that it almost feels silly to even list those justifications as assumptions in your argument.
Voting systems have been figured out to the level of standard mathematical detail (i.e. belief + justification). And my methodology post that I linked to you is explaining why justifications of the form they use are unambiguously correct in the world of policy. (Again that series is not finished yet, but the only roadblock is making it entertaining to read, I’ve already figured out the mathematical details.)
So to me, arguing against a voting system change is like saying “Maybe there are a finite number of primes” or “Maybe this table I’m resting my arms on right now doesn’t actually exist”. I.e. these really are things that we can, for all intents and purposes, be certain of. And if you’re not certain of these basic things, we can’t really ever discuss anything productively.
It’s not a matter of the Dunning–Kruger effect; it’s that experts understand these problems well enough. You can find professors who specialise in voting theory and ask them. Ask them “Is there any chance that replacing the current presidential voting system with any of the most promising current alternatives will be a mistake in 100,000 years?” The amount of time is totally irrelevant when you understand a problem well enough. One plus one will always equal two.
To be clear, I’m not saying every policy problem is solved. But some policy problems are solved. (Or in the case of voting theory, sufficiently solved as to far outperform the current system, and we know that there is no unknown system will blow our current proposals out of the water due to Arrow’s impossibility theorem.) And establishing some of those policies is difficult because of short-term incentives. This delay tactic is a way to implement that specific subset of policies, and only that subset.
Denying this 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.
I appreciate it. If I do write a longer version, it won’t be on here, because I have no tools to moderate the comment section.
How would the enforcement perpetuity be valued? I agree, it would not be worth $1T at the moment before default because the market would assign some probability that the legislators would follow through the land value tax. Now, the important question is, “Does that matter?” I say no, it doesn’t, and my reasoning is as follows.
If you bought a $100M lottery ticket, what’s it worth before the numbers come out? Basically zero. But what if the numbers come up and they match your ticket? You’ve won the jackpot, literally. Now what if that happens, but the lottery owners don’t pay? Are you going to be okay with that? Are you going to say, “The ticket was never worth much anyway, so it doesn’t matter”? No, that’s a huuuuge breach of contract! You don’t just get to not pay $100M dollars and have no impact on your financial credibility. That’s crazy talk. If they didn’t pay, you’d be very upset, and rightfully so.
I don’t think that because “It’s a one-off, not a repeat lottery business” is a meaningful distinction here. The government issuing debt is a repeat business.
My actual work is at an investment fund. If I saw a government being like “Nah, we’re not paying that $1T perpetuity because it’s a weird security”, I am selling every regular bond of theirs that we own as fast as I reasonably can. If they can just not pay that $1T contract, what else are they capable of? I am significantly increasing my probability of them defaulting.
People like me would sell the government’s regular bonds ASAP, which drops the bond’s prices, thereby increasing the rate of interest that the government has to pay on new debt. The fund managers who didn’t do this are having to explain to their investors why they didn’t sell before the prices dropped. The government just defaulted on a major debt, and their reaction was to do nothing. That’s not a good career move. Fund managers don’t want to be in that position, so even if they personally don’t think it’s a huge risk, they know that other fund managers do, so they’re forced to sell as well.
You’re right, but you’re not fully thinking a selfish policymaker. If I were a selfish policymaker, I would implement the land value tax regardless of what I think of it, so now the government now doesn’t have to pay $1T of debt. So now I create $1T worth of new debt, and spend it on public services that will buy me more votes. Governments do not have access to infinite debt, despite what some crackpots say. (If government did have access to infinite debt, most of our problems are solved.)
I don’t know if I’ll respond to your next message. I’ll send you a private message on where I’ll be writing in future.