> Leave wealth building for bitcoin and Apple stock and companies that make mascara.
The flip side of this - people then complain that we have 25 different high-tech varieties of boner pills while the developing world is dealing with antibiotic-resistant infections and malaria. Despite the SV Founder Changing The World rhetoric, most people are in business to get paid. People go where the money is.
If you declare that no one should get rich off of bread because it's A Basic Necessity, you're going to find that the bread biz is going to stagnate while endless innovation happens in the Twinkie and tortilla chip biz. Some martyrs who are willing to sacrifice their career prospects to work in bread will stick around and make process, but the legions of people who are just looking for a non-shitty job are going to stay far away.
"If you declare that no one should get rich off of bread because it's A Basic Necessity, you're going to find that the bread biz is going to stagnate"
If you declare that nobody should get rich off there being a shortage of bread because it's a basic necessity, you're not going to stop somebody getting rich from making artisanally crafted locally sourced handcrafted sourdough (or whatever).
> If you declare that no one should get rich off of bread because it's A Basic Necessity, you're going to find that the bread biz is going to stagnate while endless innovation happens in the Twinkie and tortilla chip biz
This is simply false.
We've declared water A Basic Necessity, such that clean water is piped into everyone's home, by the government, at effectively zero profit.
And yet, there's still over 100 bottled water types and brands, carried at almost every retailer nationwide. There's 6 dozen flavoured water types, there's an entire industry of water pitchers, water purifiers, carbonated water drinks, and much more. Clean Water is now a crazy innovative industry in large part because we made it a covered fundamental human need.
You absolutely can declare housing A Basic Necessity, and it wouldn't hurt any meaningful industries, it wouldn't prevent any innovation, and it would largely improve the finances of most citizens, strengthening the economy at large.
Yup. That is the problem right here in the real world. Don't disagree a bit. We've seen what happens with price controls, rent controls, government subsidies and mandates.
That's why I say I see the problem, not the answer. But I'm pretty sure we can do better than we are right now. Policies discouraging wealth accumulation through living quarters might be a good start.
You don't necessarily need price controls or rent controls. You could put a special tax on second homes which would make renting and investing economically unfeasible. You could even make it so that speculation was enabled by allowing the sale of derivative housing futures (a young person would buy a house at a reduced price, and then have to pay the investor every time the house's price increased over the next 10 years). That would allow both investors to speculate and young people to buy.
Have you ever read much about land value taxation? I think a well-implemented LVT could do a lot to help with these problems -- though I'm no expert, it seems a lot of economists rate it favourably.
The flip side of this - people then complain that we have 25 different high-tech varieties of boner pills while the developing world is dealing with antibiotic-resistant infections and malaria. Despite the SV Founder Changing The World rhetoric, most people are in business to get paid. People go where the money is.
If you declare that no one should get rich off of bread because it's A Basic Necessity, you're going to find that the bread biz is going to stagnate while endless innovation happens in the Twinkie and tortilla chip biz. Some martyrs who are willing to sacrifice their career prospects to work in bread will stick around and make process, but the legions of people who are just looking for a non-shitty job are going to stay far away.