An interview with Alex Tabarrok:
Future residents don’t have the vote, so we prevent building which placates the fears of current homeowners but prevents future residents from moving in. Future patients don’t have the vote, so we regulate drug prices at the expense of future new drug innovations and so forth. This has always been true, of course, but culture can be a solution to otherwise tough-to-solve incentive problems. America’s forward looking, pro-innovation, pro-science culture meant that in the past we were more likely to protect the future.
What about huge stimulus spending, elimination of student debt and deficit spending? It’s been said that the reason politicians never get excited about paying down National Debt (and why they enjoy running up the National Debt) is it primarily effects people who will not be able to vote until the politicians are long out of office. Build Back Better is a spending spree on a credit card that doesn’t come due for decades. That’s not really making America ‘better’.