I have not worked in water/sewage, but the characteristics are quite different compared to electricity--electricity cannot be stored, it needs to be sent directly from the power plant to the consumer at the exact moment it is consumed, but on the other hand electricity can be produced more or less on demand with the quantity limited only by your willingness to pay. Water is finite, and is simply being managed by the utility rather than created on demand. Someone collecting rainwater is still impacting the local water system and depending on the environment this still needs to be managed by someone.

This is not true, not at all, it dipped as China grew initially, but looking at the past few years this trend had reversed and the US was again growing as a percentage of the global economy, going from a low of about 21% in 2011 to nearly 27% today. It seems certain now that Trump has put a bullet in this growth, but it was hardly inevitable. In 2024 the US was in an incredibly strong position relative to the rest of the world.

If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.

Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.

Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.

This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.

I read articles and comments about people who were fired or suffered other consequences for something they said online, and the responses are righteous indignation--they ought to have known better than to post these things online! How did we get into this fucked up state of affairs? Social media started off as a way to talk to your friends, and over time your friends have been replaced with strangers, what they can say and who gets to say what controlled by centralized authorities, while individuals have been taught to self-censor.

It is not only the US companies or Russian bots, every government in the world is itching to get their thumb on the scale here to have a say in what the people are allowed to see, to hear, and to say.

If Black Rock is guilty of anything here above all else, it's taking advantage of a situation deliberately created for someone else. If government policy wasn't already going balls to the wall trying to constantly pump up property values, there'd be no investment returns to be had.

Give me the levers of federal, state, and local government and I promise you I can completely tank property values in 48 hours or less.