BLUF: This isn’t a profoundly deep post—it just shows my current, general views on a variety of current economic issues.
I do not believe future people are intrinsically less valuable than the people existing today. In fact, I think they might be more valuable because their lives will intrinsically be more worth living as their well-being will probably be greater. I also respect the validity of the 20% chance of extinction by 2100 that is the average of a number of researchers’ estimations, so I think that even considering a variety of extinction scenarios, there are many more future people expected to exist in the future. Thus, I think we should optimize our political and economic policies to serve future peoples’ interests even more than the selfish interests of those people alive today. What does this look like in concrete policies?
- Steep carbon taxes
- Taxes on essential ecological service destruction priced at the cost of replacement
- A Land-value tax
- a minimum Universal Basic Income instead of less-efficient government social programs like Social Security and welfare
- Substantially lower taxes on free market interactions and the products of people’s labor. Taking money away from those who are best at fulfilling other people’s preferences does not seem to be an optimal recipe for economic growth.
Principles behind optimizing our economy for the long-term future
- A willingness to bear the temporary economic losses, as a society, of implementing steep carbon taxes and ecological service destruction taxes.
- More deliberate experimentation to test policies via states and charter cities.
- Beyond concerns about environmental destruction, being willing to optimize for economic growth more than redistributing resources to satisfy the preferences of everyone who happens to be alive today. Social security recipients are no longer actively contributing to the economy, so we should cut their funding to give working individuals a UBI insofar as this increases their productivity.
Beyond optimizing for the long-term, I generally support:
- Lifting economically stifling regulation; we should make entrepreneurship as easy as possible. One shouldn’t need to consult a lawyer to start many personal businesses. We need to drastically reduce the size of the Federal Register. Further, I think someone ought to create an AI-assistant app to help individuals navigate legal-space in order to decrease the uncertainty in this arena and lower-barriers to free market interactions.
- Lifting barriers to competition like government-mandated occupational licensing and needless, anti-competitive laws from regulatory capture.
- Free trade in order to capitalize on economies of scale and allow people to better pursue their comparative advantage.
- Much greater immigration for both economic and social justice reasons.