Re: YIMBYs - I strongly recommend reading The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein to understand the origins of the complex housing zoning codes. It becomes really clear really fast that people like controlling other people's property tinged with a high degree of historical racism.
Re: reducing risk - I think a major economic and societal issue was the sudden move in 2008 to have the government guaranteeing almost everything after a slow creep over the decades with things like FHA loans. My philosophy of government guarantees is really simple. If guarantees are necessary, then the guaranteed entity needs to be heavily regulated so that the likelihood of future loss is likely to be low, along with the potential for future profits. The recent regional bank deposit guarantees are a classic example where $250,000 suddenly becomes $250 million for a guarantee limit. Raise the guarantee limit (makes sense to go substantially higher for business deposits that need cash for payroll etc.) and dramatically increase the cash reserves required. The current lobbying to trying to get cryptocurrency into a regulated environment, presumably so that government guarantees would become available which is kind of the antithesis of the concept of cryptocurrency.
One day it would be nice to see political leaders be forced to do math in public…
Re: YIMBYs - I strongly recommend reading The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein to understand the origins of the complex housing zoning codes. It becomes really clear really fast that people like controlling other people's property tinged with a high degree of historical racism.
Re: reducing risk - I think a major economic and societal issue was the sudden move in 2008 to have the government guaranteeing almost everything after a slow creep over the decades with things like FHA loans. My philosophy of government guarantees is really simple. If guarantees are necessary, then the guaranteed entity needs to be heavily regulated so that the likelihood of future loss is likely to be low, along with the potential for future profits. The recent regional bank deposit guarantees are a classic example where $250,000 suddenly becomes $250 million for a guarantee limit. Raise the guarantee limit (makes sense to go substantially higher for business deposits that need cash for payroll etc.) and dramatically increase the cash reserves required. The current lobbying to trying to get cryptocurrency into a regulated environment, presumably so that government guarantees would become available which is kind of the antithesis of the concept of cryptocurrency.