Giving that people are overusing drugs, I think you should let people the ability to eat sugar pills when they have the flu instead of going for something building bacterial resistance or having side effects.

Even scams like homeopathy can be useful via the placebo effect, at least for disorders where the placebo effect is significant.

I understand that to be true, but I’ve also read recently that the placebo effect is largely overstated.

I think I’m doubly bitter about homeopathy in particular because it’s available on the NHS. My tax money is going to fraudsters.

How on earth did the providers of such convince the NHS? They are by large considered quacks and has been ridiculed on state TV (NRK, our BBC) numerous times.

> Homeopathy isn't widely available on the NHS. In 2017, NHS England recommended that GPs and other prescribers should stop providing it. [0]

Luckily this is no longer the case (in general)!

[0] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Homeopathy/

If you remove the ability for people to spend money on worthless things, they will only have money to spend on useful things, and thus drive up inflation.

Wait, what? So waste is good for economy now?

Not good, but better for society than rich people siting in a pile of cash forever? It is like vegetables. They are not good, but they are better than eating more carbs.

Cash is paper. No one cares about paper. Numbers in a bank account are numbers in a database somewhere. No one particularly cares about numbers in databases. What we care about is either investment or consumption, the use of resources. If rich people are not consuming their wealth then they are not using their resources. That means they’re available for everyone else to use because there’s only so much productive capacity in the economy and most of the time it’s almost all being used.

Investment is good for creating future wealth. Not using money rounds to investment, not at a personal level, but at a macroeconomic one.

Not true. Positional goods aren’t worthless but their worth is rank ordered, not “real”. Given that development in SF is de facto illegal there is going to be very little change in the number of penthouse luxury apartments. The prices can go up an enormous amount if rich people from outside want to move in.