Rent controls would worsen housing shortages by crushing the incentive to build. The profit margins of big supermarket chains, demonised by Gen-Z socialists, are already wafer-thin after years of ruthless competition—a miracle of modern capitalism. Wealth taxes would become confiscatory and deter innovation. Do not assume that the failure of these policies, if implemented, would bring about an automatic course correction. Europe has struggled for decades to escape the low-growth funk left by its own over-regulation; the rise of statist “Peronists” in Argentina helps explain its century of relative decline.
Personally, I do find a lot of the modern progressive discourse about this to be pretty facile. When confronted with wealth flight, common answers tend to be “let 'em leave” (a mind bogglingly dumb take if these are the people you need to fund everything) to “well they won’t leave” despite evidence to the contrary.
It’s like these folks think they’ve stumbled onto an infinite money glitch and I’ve yet to see a serious discussion that weighs any cons or possible dangers. It’s dumb when trump can’t admit there might be costs or downsides to his ideas, the same is true of us.
That’s them summing this version of socialism.
They then go on to argue it is dangerous because:
Personally, I do find a lot of the modern progressive discourse about this to be pretty facile. When confronted with wealth flight, common answers tend to be “let 'em leave” (a mind bogglingly dumb take if these are the people you need to fund everything) to “well they won’t leave” despite evidence to the contrary.
It’s like these folks think they’ve stumbled onto an infinite money glitch and I’ve yet to see a serious discussion that weighs any cons or possible dangers. It’s dumb when trump can’t admit there might be costs or downsides to his ideas, the same is true of us.