Let's say that your town is considering whether to preserve a zoning policy of all single family homes with a large minimum lot size, or is looking to allow density. What would prevent you from supporting the lower-density option?
One reason may be that you are concerned that restricting the development of land would drive scarcity, leading land values to rise (which would cause your property tax to rise). You're effectively forced to pay for the cost of rising land prices.
...Now, if you are sheltered from rising land values, as per Prop 13, you now suffer no repercussions from a downzoning, and in fact may be completely indifferent to how the land market is behaving. Many homeowners are now free to act in their own best interest (which means downzoning), instead of being incentivized to create capacity for more housing.
If you're already landless, Amazon coming in isn't going to help you become landed, outside of a handful of the earliest people to get in before the speculators hit. They'll create high paying jobs, but they'll create equally (or likely more) expensive houses.
Anyone wanting to live in Nashville (just to pick one city from the list) who's capable of working for Amazon is also capable of working for someone in Nashville today. And generally, the economics of being tech talent outside these hotbed markets like SV and Seattle are vastly favorable.
That is to say, you're probably better off buying the cheap house in a smaller market on the salary you can command in that market than you are buying a very expensive house on the salary that the very expensive market offers you. Google would pay me more than my current job, but my cost of living would go up by more than my salary -- massively so.
Against local companies (like for in Seattle), it also creates an issue of competition for employment. In Seattle, every job I'm applying to is also being applied to by ex-Microsoft and ex-Amazon employees. It's a much harder competition to land jobs, but in the smaller markets you could find work much more easily.
Some things are not cut-and-dry. Some are. Something like abolitionism has been justified by history as mere common sense, and an absolutely necessary component of a humane society.
I'm curious how China currently views Sun Yat-sen's "Three Principles of the People"[0], one of which is Democracy. Does his philosophy attract any attention today?
China takes Democracy (民主) very seriously. You'll see it on propaganda banners everywhere. You see, the leadership is democratically appointed by the will of the people. The 100% majority of the CCP is completely justified by its benevolent rule.
/s
There is no need to abandon old principles when you can just use doublethink to make them mean whatever you want them to mean.
> Something like abolitionism has been justified by history as mere common sense, and an absolutely necessary component of a humane society.
If taxation by a non-representative government isn't as much common sense as abolitionism, it's only because of a huge amount of propaganda. It is not even much fundamentally different from slavery.
What is that large difference? Authoritarian states deal with their people basically as if they were their property. They dispose of their lives at will, they dictate what they think and what they work on, they take their labor at will.
Sorry, I misunderstood your original comment as referring to the the US.
However I don’t think that the system in China is like what happened with slavery (it is China you refer to?). People aren’t kidnapped, chained and transported in conditions that kill large numbers.
They aren’t traded in degrading markets and are not routinely beaten to death or mutilated by masters. They aren’t branded.
As bad as conditions currently are it doesn’t seem like slavery to me.
I wasn't talking specifically about China, or specifically about America colonialism style slavery. But I would bet that there are plenty of people kidnaped and forcefully transported around the country on China for labor, that's what that kind of government normally does.
They may not be traded on degrading markets, but that just make people valueless from the point of view of a dictatorship. And I do actually expect people are being mutilated by the Chinese government all the time, we just probably don't hear about it. Again, that what this kind of government normally does.
I don't claim to be an expert on any of this, but it's pretty clear that China is unwilling to deny trade with North Korea, effectively propping up the Kim regime. Kim is engaging in increasingly dangerous provocations (admittedly provoked by the fact that the United States is still fighting the Korean War).
Chinese here. I could say, if our government proves capitalism can be very well integrated and become more productive in an authoritarianism society, then that is a really bad news for democracy.
On the other hand though, after watching many Fox News clips on Youtube, I don't think you guys are doing very well on democracy, especially the people in the US.
Democracy is much harder to maintain than authoritarianism. It's very easy to get hijacked, especially the world is full of liars now days.
I'm not saying you should abort democracy, instead, you guys should be grateful for what you have, and be careful don't lose it, because if you did, you probably won't get another one for free.
US national level politics has been stuck in neutral for a while. But local and state level governments have been often doing pretty well. So although it's not visible on the surface, I think US democracy is doing "good enough". I think a key here is that one person / governing body really doesn't have all the power here.
Fox News is populist media; populist media is a "feature" in practically every country. On the other hand, populist media on the "other side" exists without too much conflict here so far. There's also more sober sources of information too, for those that feel that both are pretty junky. Honestly, the fact that polar opposite populist mouthpieces can both exist is probably a better indicator of democracy than the fact that a single populist media outlet exists. If one had to ding our democracy at the moment, it's that high level government officials in the US are trying to discredit media sources more than in previous times. It's not censorship by any means yet, but it is something to watch (and, if one was a US citizen, seriously push back on).
China will be interesting to watch too. Although they've come a long way, they are still a middle income country by PPP. I can't think of any high income country of late (other than petro-dictatorships) that hasn't embraced some form of more democratic, more open model. Xi Jinping is going in the opposite direction.
The interesting question is whether his current concentration of power will satisfy, and truly keep the stability they seek, of all of the 1.4 billion people in China... especially at a time when China's middle class is rising. I also wonder whether the current control tightening of information, and a reluctance (so far) to ease off the heavy handiness of government involvement in business, will harm innovation in China in the long run. We'll see -- not being Chinese, I obviously don't know enough to wonder anything other than some vague "armchair thoughts".
Your country already got hijacked by outsiders. You just don't know it because it's a secret.
Yale put Mao Zedong into power. Every US ambassador to China after that has been a member of Skull and Bones.
You are correct that maintaining power in a Democracy is more difficult. That is why the secret society wants to make China the model for a new world government. The US must be destroyed for this to happen.
Their trade with North Korea has been cut in half since last year, and they've repeatedly supported increased sanctions, including yesterday.
Here in the United States it's popular to isolate nations on the far side of the planet, where we don't have to directly deal with the horrific consequences. But North Korea borders China, and the Chinese will need to deal with the effects of a full or partial North Korean collapse.
And I don't think it's actually an effective (or humane) was to try to solve problems like this to begin with.
This is fair. Anyway, sanctions of this sort are absolutely immoral unless a government is willing to take on all affected refugees, which is very very rarely the case. Human rights abuses are difficult to solve without open borders, but unfortunately open borders are politically infeasible.
Clearly it wasn’t a moral or just choice, but when China has seen rebellions that lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people in the last century, you can at least see why the incumbent government may have had pause.
It's the kind of thing that isn't obvious at present, at least given most discussions of money, equities, and wealth. But with a different economic paradigm, some of things concepts become more obvious. Henry George was commenting on precisely this some 140 years ago:
1) It can fund revenue for public goods with little to no deadweight loss
2) It targets "unearned wealth" instead of earned income
3) It grows with the growth of a municipal area, allowing for public finance that scales with the demands of a growing city
4) It can efficiently be used to pay for declining cost industries within a municipality (natural monopolies such as public transit)
5) It naturally is compatible with a UBI, insofar as you're merely distributing value which is considered to be commonly owned to all
One reason may be that you are concerned that restricting the development of land would drive scarcity, leading land values to rise (which would cause your property tax to rise). You're effectively forced to pay for the cost of rising land prices.
...Now, if you are sheltered from rising land values, as per Prop 13, you now suffer no repercussions from a downzoning, and in fact may be completely indifferent to how the land market is behaving. Many homeowners are now free to act in their own best interest (which means downzoning), instead of being incentivized to create capacity for more housing.