Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48484544

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Search for "positive ad hominem".

Even under capitalism you can still volunteer, donate and create community orgs to build things, there's nothing stopping anyone.

Surely there is a disincentive to working hard as taxes approach high levels while resources are increasingly provided for free if one doesn't work. The Laffer curve and all that.

If you keep increasing taxes and reward people that don't work by giving them free and easy wealth, the tax revenue will actually go down at some point instead of going up, leaving less to redistribute. It's like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

https://fee.org/articles/the-laffer-curve-its-time-to-stop-l...

No, after 9/11 they passed a rule to always collect biometrics before issuing visas and validating them at border entry. The DoS facilities in the US did not have fingerprinting facilities but the consulates and embassies did, so they forced the change. Recently there was a pilot to allow it in the US itself.

If someone wants to passively invest $3M into a new coffee shop and pay labor to work in it, banning it like you want to do will kill the economy and disadvantage the little guy.

All the reforms fit a capitalistic model, not just a free commerce model.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231586

And of course, Mao's communism was very anti-capitalistic.

That's a reactionary emotional reaction that many countries started with and failed and led to people fleeing and the govts banning people leaving. Examples include East Germany, North Korea, the eastern bloc etc.

History has shown again and again that chasing away high earners with super high taxes like doctors, tech workers, small business owners etc. leads to worse outcomes for everyone because they already pay a large share of total taxes. Also, they may quit and just collect the welfare off the high earners tax income. At the federal level the top 1% pay 40% of federal taxes, that's not even counting the jobs they create. Imagine a place trying to serve 99% of the people with only 60% of the tax revenue. They're either going to increase the taxes till there's no one left to overtax or reduce govt services which reduces govt employment leading to lower tax collection and even more welfare spending.

Taxes on things discourage the use of things, that's why high taxes on smoking and alcohol work. Supertaxing economic productivity and rewarding people sitting around not working will and has led to lower economic productivity.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6521/c6521.pdf

I got a lot of downvotes making these comments and ran into posting limits. HN isn't a place for debates like this, you win, socialism is amazing, everyone upvote me now.

Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work. The productive people get tired of the product of their hard work being forcibly taken away and stop working since they would be given resources anyway. That's how the system collapses since there aren't enough resources for everyone to sit and consume. Thats exactly what happened in the eastern bloc. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...

How many times should we run the same failed experiment and ruin millions more lives?

https://www.africadatahub.org/blog/what-usaid-funding-of-afr...

https://www.ft.com/content/c10e4f2f-5564-42a4-8aa7-66c78ca1c...

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/kathy-hoch...

Instead for the past century we have almost everyone in the world wanting or not minding moving to the hypercapitalist USA.

Ironically almost all the countries with emigration controls and exit visas in the past century were noncapitalistic countries trying to stop their people from fleeing to capitalistic countries.

Maybe we can look at societies where the modern era hasn't touched, like some places in Africa. Why is the quality of life so great there that everyone wants to move from hypercapitalistic societies like the US to Africa instead of the other way around?

The reforms in China I listed heavily cut down on that. Are you claiming that China is somehow less capitalistic now compared to 1976?

By your metric the US isn't capitalistic because NASA and various govt agencies and entitlements worth trillions of dollars a year of taxes exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_and_opening_up

> The reforms [starting in 1976] de-collectivized agriculture, abolished the people's communes, relaxed price controls, allowed foreign direct investment into China, and led to the creation of special economic zones, most prominently the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. Private enterprises were allowed to grow, while many state-owned enterprises were scaled down or privatized. Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange were established in 1990, allowing a capital market system

However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.