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Exactly this, Europe will ditch China soon.

Planned economy is not when there are regulations

For me, the context was surplus to drive prices down. If you want to avoid surplus, you need other ways to regulate prices. Do you just want to fix prices for many things and otherwise let companies figure out how to supply the things for the given price?

“Manipulation” implies intent to achieve that state of affairs, and, no, that wasn’t the goal of capital. Capital wanted ROI and looked for it in the wrong place.

It is a political decision to keep the housing market stable. If the market goes down, many people lose their retirement provisions.

There are not enough plots, in Germany the rent is capped but the building requirements don’t allow to reduce costs. Change those, and capital will build more housing. But capital doesn’t matter. Those syndicates could build all housing, but they can’t, because the housing market is politically manipulated.

In the US, yes. Europe by and large doesn’t have such inane laws.

There are enough laws in Germany that you cannot have a prefabricated house and build it everywhere without ajustments. Low tech high risers should bring rent down to a fraction but they are not allowed to be built.

The middle class would be paying the taxes for public UBI, too. The problem is that the huge part of social insurance money would be paid twice if it is a club, once as taxes for the general population and once as membership fees to the club for unemployed members.

A UBI club is an investment in social change. It does not have to fully make economic sense but needs members who want the change and are willing to pay for it.

If UBI is on top of social insurance money for members, instead of diminishing it, and if money given to the club is tax deductable, the economics should make sense. So it may need some political change.

Like you say, UBI is sharing income with lower income people. If that is not acceptable for a huge part of the population it would not be possible to introduce it.

why such stuff should be allowed in the first place,

Because we have a market economy. We can switch to planning, but that has its own disadvantages

why should ordinary folks have trouble getting apartments just so that some rich fucks can try to make profit.

They should not. It’s market manipulation that we don’t have enough apartments. With different zoning laws or more plots to built, there would be enough apartments.

speculators throwing money around, artificially increasing property, land, and construction prices.

Tax empty housing, or housing in general, and speculation will disappear.

Still the rent prices you can achieve with that are nothing like you see on the open market.

In which way? Why are those apartments not on the open market?

It is irrational to expect rational behaviour from people.

That’s also why people shouldn’t be forced to be rational. The Sovjet Union was forcing people to be rational but people weren’t happy.

Broken window

I tried to make sense with this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

Now it’s clear.

Who would join a club to do UBI in a private way? Pay a fraction of one’s income into a pool that is distributed among all members.

The disadvantage would be that everybody would expect each member to work at first. In the long run, the club could try to have capital to reduce the need for work.

If that gets big enough, UBI for everybody would be possible without having to create a political change.

That’s the “speculation” part.

A surplus in supply would threaten them with an infinite time to wait for their target ROI.

the solution is regulation in the form of taxing vacant property

fully agree

If you don’t want all the power to end up with whoever happens to have money you gotta stomp people with money at some point or the other

Fiat currency. Public banks can hand out credits to whomever wants to build with a solid calculation.

If you don’t want all the power to end up with whoever happens to have money you gotta stomp people with money at some point or the other

You tax them. Of course only possible if the masses are not manipulated. Drones and AI, stomping would only be possible for something like 5 more years. Afterwards there is not much more power left.

120 Euro fridges turning into 150 Euros fridges

More like 120 Euro fridges leave the market and 150 Euro fridges cost 200 Euros.

Building things in a solid way is a different thing than blinging it out: Don’t push designers to get rid of the fourth bolt for the attachment plate, don’t save fifty cents by buying cheap lubricant

I want to live in a society where people choose the solid products on their own. Everything else calls for trouble down the line.

May increase GDP in the broken window way but who the hell wants that.

I don’t undderstand that.

The main bottleneck for the housing market is land in areas where people want to live. People have to pay whatever they can to live close to their work. If demand is so big, of course only housing with the highest margins is developed, which is the luxery market.

The speculative capital is flowing because the high demand keeps prices stable. If there would be a surplus to the point that the speculative capital doesn’t find a buyer when selling, prices would be much lower. The backing for the high prices are the real tenants though who want to live where they work.

Appliances don’t need the speculative capital to become expensive. It is enough if there is less competition. Then customers can’t ‘move’ to other products and have to pay whatever is demanded.

If the requirements stay limited to an extended warranty then things can remain competitive but I doubt that the regulations will end there. This should take cheap Chinese brands off the market that don’t have a support network in Europe. That’s good for nature, but it removes the cheap options off the market which will allow the market to rise the prices for the cheapest durable goods.

Manufacturers are not off the hook. If they are not reliable then the expected runtime is low and their monthly payments go up.

the European economical policy is ordoliberal

Without Britain, it could become more ordo than liberal.

We don’t have to prevent this regulation. However we should prepare ourselves to prevent the appliance market to become like the housing market. Citizens are unable to make a change there. That shouldn’t be ignored when other markets are regulated more.

Most voters rely on the campaign communications which was not equally good. Is it too far fetched to think that Remain was intentionally bad?

That’s a good argument but doesn’t fit the situation. The bad buying decisions can be corrected with market mechanisms. Allow people to finance the products over the entire expected lifetime. Then high quality goods are cheaper and people will choose them.

Some people speculated that Britain left the EU because they believe in markets whereas many EU countries don’t. This could be one of many decisions that put the EU onto a different trajectory. We will see in 20 years if the EU can stay on top of its regulations.

I wouldn’t mind switching to a society that is built on altruism. My point is that the EU is not an inherent benevolent government. These regulations will be abused and I believe that there would be less abuse if we spent the resources on infrastructure that allows the consumers to make better decisions.

the EU should create infrastructure that allows consumers to compare products objectively

forms of market failure. Because that is how it works out in the real world

I think that it is better to improve the markets and minimize the market failures instead of trying to regulate everything.

Everything has to be checked by institutions if consumers are kept ignorant whereas competent consumers do that work for free.

Yes, and that’s why competition is needed so that the ‘as much rent as possible’ is minimized. I am not arguing against a helpful society. We don’t exchange goods for compassion but for money so we need competition.

Regulatory capture. It already exists in the housing market, medical equipment, medical drugs, etc. There, things are more expensive than necessary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

The shift in responsibility to the EU is not free. Of course, it costs some taxes to run the institutions that enforce the regulations. But who is supervising those institutions? That would be up to the citizens, instead of comparing products directly.

Are citizens going to do that? Have citizens checked the sourcing of the covid vaccines?

That feels like a move on the slippery slope from a market economy to a planning economy.

The objective is honorable, but better value should come from customer choices, not from regulations.

Instead of making those rules and establishing institutions that enforce them, the EU should create infrastructure that allows consumers to compare products objectively. Add the opportunity to finance more expensive but also more durable products easily and there is no need to suffocate everything in regulations.

I should add that this recreates the limited housing markets for consumer goods. This is going to make life more expensive despite each rule being very reasonable. The promise of the EU were free markets, but the opposite is happening.

British newspapers regularly reported how stupid the EU is. Unlike other countries, they made sure that the population was on the edge of EU acceptance. Everybody pretening that Brexit was just stupidity allows the EU to avoid the debate about whatever was the major political difference that led to the separation.

Project 2025 is from 2022, Finland joined NATO 2023. They are fully committed.

When you start hiring less intelligent people who can’t help but actually believe the propaganda.

Central command is no material infrastructure. Europe can listen to a European commander when they are fighting European fights.

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