Imo, the Democrats are a pretty miquetoast centrist party on economics, hardly "far left". They're broadly in favor of free trade with a modest safety net (quite modest, by first-world standards). Heck, I'm not sure more than a smallish minority of the party would even qualify as true social democrats, let alone actual leftists.
On policy terms, I would disagree that tax rates are strongly relevant to a startup scene (not irrelevant, but not one of the more sensitive environmental factors). I do think regulation is an important aspect. One reason I would support discontinuing the use of regulations to achieve quasi-safety-nets and replacing them with direct safety nets. But as for why SV is in SV? I think culture, networks, and education have a bigger role in it. Otherwise you'd expect a vibrant startup scene in lower-tax parts of the U.S. than California, Massachusetts, and New York, and we aren't really seeing that.
Neither party really supports the issues that Silicon Valley cares about. The California Democratic caucus listens to Hollywood and unions more than SV.
I agree that culture, social networks, and education matter more than issues to explain voting behavior. College-educated people vote for Democrats and leftist propositions, so S.V. does too.
>We have plenty of examples of high-tax, high-regulation economies around the world with no startup scene.
Sure, but California is already high-tax compared to most of the US. Why isn't Silicon Valley in a state with no state level income or cap gains tax? There's a number of European countries that have marginal taxation similar to California, why isn't there start-up scene worth talking about there?
There is one Silicon Valley in the whole world, sure there is plenty of innovation elsewhere, but for the software industry there is one stand-out and that is the valley. If there were a few of them then we could easily draw parallels between them and see what they have in common, as it is we can't do that because we have an n=1 situation where all we can do is speculate.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870472800457617...
It's one of the classic problems of democracy - two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
This is a definition of left/right that depends on public opinion and not who controls the discourse. You could definitely argue that progressive taxation as defined by popular discourse in America is left. But that would be ceding too much power to the minority which controls political discourse in America, IMHO.
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I'm not sure how you figure. Were you perhaps under the impression that Space X and Tesla were funded solely by Musk? Considering Tesla's operating expenses last year cleared $400M and they are currently in debt, I am fairly certain Tesla is not funded solely by Musk's pocket book.
Anyway, so what if investments are taxed more heavily? So long as all types of investments are taxed equally, you will still have plenty of people investing in new business ventures.
http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/12/space-age-risks-and-profoun...
I'm sure he would have found a way to make do with 1% less capital. But what if rates had been 9% higher, as they will be going forward? What if rates were 28% higher, as they would be if cap gains were treated as ordinary income? At some point, either Space X or Tesla would have never been made.
The tragedy is that we will never know the future Space Xs that are never built.
Speaking as a foreign onlooker (I'm in Australia), I see more libertarians than any other stripe, tbqh.
> Yet Silicon Valley regularly supports candidates and policies that would place large burdens on the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The Bay Area is home to San Francisco, a traditional hotbed of leftist activism. It's also home to UCB, a traditional hotbed of leftist activism. Some of the outlying suburbs are ... yes, traditional hotbeds of leftist activism.
Mix in:
1. The relatively lower presence of traditional / conservative / "silent majority" voters who are motivated voters
2. That leftists are motivated voters
3. That libertarians are often not motivated voters
4. That voting in the USA is voluntary and not compulsory
and the electoral calculus suggests that libertarians will be out-numbered by leftists at the ballot box.
Paul Graham's informal poll of investors had two-thirds voting for Obama. That's a stronger lean than the US as a whole. They might be libertarians, but they're libertarians voting for the unionist/leftist/regulatory party.
Could you name one mainstream left concept that Obama opposes?
He also appoints people who are activist regulators and judges who view the Constitution as no limit to progressive doctrine.
Plurality voting systems lead to "least worst" strategies dominating.
In the sense that I expect a larger sample size to give more accurate results, yes.
Or maybe it's just that other people disagree with libertarians' notion of absolute freedom. Perhaps they define freedom differently. I'm sure most of us want the same things in life (like a decent standard of living), but we just can't seem to agree on the best ways to achieve them.
Of course, it's much easier to coerce people into doing the things you want them to do by making the desired behavior a matter of law than to convince each individual to cooperate and use his own free will to obtain the same result, so an undisciplined and unrestrained populace is going to disregard the "no voting on dinner" rule and use the force of the government to get what they want.
Libertarians define freedom as the absolute, unbridled exercise of private property titles.
Non-libertarians take exception to both the extent (the "absolute, unbridled" part) and the core matter ("private property titles") for various reasons. Among these reasons:
* Any value legislated into absolute supremacy becomes steadily more and more totalitarian. People want some moderation.
* An archipelago of private dictatorships is called "feudalism", and is no better than a single public dictatorship.
* "Property is theft!", as Bakunin put it. Private property titles are themselves a form of government-enforced coercion. Taxes you only have to pay once a year, land-rent you pay once a month, exploitative wage-labor you perform every weekday.
* Even the most proprietarian society has some kind of public space, and it must be managed somehow. Example: you can't run naked through the streets.
* Some people genuinely believe that "freedom" in the sense libertarians define it is unimportant or unworthy. See: religious conservatives.
* Private capitalist markets are provably incapable of handling public goods (National Science Foundation, NASA) and commons goods (scarce fisheries, national forests, etc).
While I appreciate your contribution of more detailed points of disagreement with some semblances of libertarian philosophy, I will refrain from refuting them because a) I don't have the time to get into it and b) it deviates into too much of a tangent to remain apropos of the original post.
"Moderation" here usually means "if you agree with me, you're just being reasonable and exercise common sense, if you disagree with me, you're an extremist and your views don't even merit discussion". You call somebody "moderate" if he mostly agrees with you, except for some insignificant details. How is is "totalitarian" to support personal freedom, is beyond me. Can you give an example of a totalitarian libertarian concept?
>>>> * An archipelago of private dictatorships is called "feudalism", and is no better than a single public dictatorship.
Please look it up in the dictionary, "feudalism" does not mean that. I can easily see one reason why small dictatorships are better - it's much easier to escape a bad small private dictator than a bad totalitarian state. Bad small dictator can be put out of business with relative ease, bad totalitarian state is very hard to change - see North Korea.
>>>> "Property is theft!", as Bakunin put it.
You mean Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He also said "anarchy is order", I wonder if you agree with that too. Also he advocated absence of government. Do you agree with that too? Way to be "moderate", in this case.
>>>> exploitative wage-labor you perform every weekday.
I don't know where you are working, but I don't perform any "exploitative labor". I've heard there are some studios in South California that produce what is called "exploitation films", but I'm not nearly pretty enough to be in show business, even though rumors are there's some money to be made there.
>>>> * Some people genuinely believe that "freedom" in the sense libertarians define it is unimportant or unworthy. See: religious conservatives.
Yes. I know. Also see: modern left. That's why I say majority of US people do not value freedom, although for quite different ideological reasons, but for one underlying reason - freedom for you means freedom for everybody else, including freedom to do what pisses you off. For most people, it is just intolerable to realize other people can do what they don't like and there's no way to stop them.
>>>> Private capitalist markets are provably incapable of handling public goods.
By "incapable" you mean "they would not produce result I like". It's like saying "gravity is incapable of handling bricks" because bricks don't fly. Private markets are perfectly capable of handling anything, they just won't produce the results politicians would like, e.g. they won't probably spend half-trillion dollars on Solyndra. Since many people want Solyndra, you need coercion to make it happen.
Taxing capital gains and ultra-high incomes is not placing a burden on the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Hell, it's not even really left-wing at all.
Further, in counterpoint: the Israeli economy supports a start-up scene larger than that of New York or Boston, second only to Silicon Valley, while paying marginal taxation rates that would have Americans squirming in their seats. We need high tax rates over here, because if we don't pay for the Army, we all die (or so the thinking goes). But also because a society without universal sick-fund membership or public higher education or scientific research grants or infrastructure projects would be uncivilized.
(Seriously, if you think "progressive Democrats" are left-wing, allow me to introduce you to my friend Karl Marx.)
Yet Silicon Valley regularly supports candidates and policies that would place large burdens on the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We have plenty of examples of high-tax, high-regulation economies around the world with no startup scene. You can't grow one by punishing success and preventing innovation.
The deal that happened today means the top California cap gains tax is going up ~11% this year (PPACA, cliff deal, prop 30). That's 11% of new capital for startups being diverted from Palo Alto to Washington.
(And yeah, I'm flagging this article because I don't like seeing pure politics on hacker news. But I'll participate while we're having the discussion)