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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m genuinely curious about the fiscally conservative bit. When I hear that phrase I always assume people mean “I don’t want to pay taxes” but my immediate next question becomes how do you believe societal level infrastructure is constructed and maintained. Things like roads, police, military. I’ve never seen a society with private infrastructure for those things. An immediate second question, assuming you are OK with a small level of taxation to accommodate the costs of the three things listed above would be, what other society level services would fall into the bucket of things that should be paid from taxation vs things that should be privatised. Things like disaster recovery services, judicial services, child welfare services, national security, border protection. I’m going to also assume you object to education and healthcare being a taxation funded expense? What about currently public buildings like libraries? Parks? Town Halls?







  • For clarity, I believe in socialism, and live in Australia, arguably one of the more successful social democracies. I’m trying to highlight how capitalism has some massive gaps when it comes to implementation.

    Interestingly, in Australia we have no rental controls, and the market just works. Prices rise and fall based on the demands of the market. At times, renting in Australia becomes unaffordable for many, and it’s all over the news, and people try to address the issue. But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard rental price controls being offered as a solution. The more common proposed solutions are to: build more affordable houses in newly created suburbs further from the city, increase public transport options to the city making outlying suburbs more viable, all of which provide downward pressure on the rental prices in the popular city districts. As construction booms, the rental market softens.

    (I copy/pasted this comment from its original location as the person I replied to deleted their comment)



  • For clarity, I believe in socialism, and live in Australia, arguably one of the more successful social democracies. I’m trying to highlight how capitalism has some massive gaps when it comes to implementation.

    Interestingly, in Australia we have no rental controls, and the market just works. Prices rise and fall based on the demands of the market. At times, renting in Australia becomes unaffordable for many, and it’s all over the news, and people try to address the issue. But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard rental price controls being offered as a solution. The more common proposed solutions are to: build more affordable houses in newly created suburbs further from the city, increase public transport options to the city making outlying suburbs more viable, all of which provide downward pressure on the rental prices in the popular city districts. As construction booms, the rental market softens.


  • I thought pure capitalism meant that a removal of controls and regulations would lead to natural consequences (like essential services workers being priced out) which would eventually lead to a lack of essential workers, which would eventually lead to the creation of affordable accommodation in the city by some enterprising business looking to capitalise on that opportunity. The free market would eventually take care of the problem. It might be disruptive in the short term, but ultimately that problem would be self resolved by the market. Bringing in regulations and controls starts to smell like socialism?!


  • But that’s the free market at work. Prices will continue to rise until they become unaffordable and landlords have empty properties. Where I live there is no rent control, and the prices keep rising as the economy and inflation rises. When rental properties are in high demand, rental prices increase across the board. When construction provides many new properties to buy, people buy, rental demand decreases, and rental prices stagnate. No need for regulation from some government body. I thought this was capitalism 101?