>Put another way, do you really think you couldn’t get a lot of people in e.g. San Francisco to sign onto a mandate that requires the rich to register outgoing capital flows?
Your example is poor; there are 10s of millions of people in California who have been trying to get healthcare reform passed for nearly a decade now and the trend so far has been Obamacare being slowly unwound. It's unclear if the far left/right is anything more than a boogeyman at this point considering the glacier pace of the Senate in the last 20 years. The media would have you believe the democrats are well on their way full blown communism, but the reality is the party self-sabotaged their own $15 minimum wage proposal and managed to be less generous than Trump on stimulus checks.
If the Federal Reserve decided to implement capital controls, I doubt it would happen democratically. It's more likely that you would wake up one day and all the major banks would have limits on how much gold you could purchase in a year for "liability reasons". I'm sure a Senator or two would scream, but the next week there would be the next culture war story with Ted Cruz complaining about MTV.
> there are 10s of millions of people in California who have been trying to get healthcare reform passed
I was responding to "who...believes this is a likely scenario?" The argument isn't "this will happen." Just that it shouldn't be beyond the pale of reasonable debate. (Like universal healthcare.)
> If the Federal Reserve decided to implement capital controls, I doubt it would happen democratically
Capital controls are populist. They shift power away from the wealthy to those at the political levers. The Fed would almost certainly not do this; the Treasury could under emergency powers. The potential for popular support would give them cover to do so.
>Capital controls are populist. They shift power away from the wealthy to those at the political levers.
No? Capital controls in western history is hardly populist. When I think of populist economic movements, the Bretton Woods System doesn't come to mind. And it's clear China's capital control serve to keep power in the hands of the autocracy; not the other way around.
If the value of the dollar was spiraling to zero it's the Fed, and their clients, that would have the most to lose.
Your example is poor; there are 10s of millions of people in California who have been trying to get healthcare reform passed for nearly a decade now and the trend so far has been Obamacare being slowly unwound. It's unclear if the far left/right is anything more than a boogeyman at this point considering the glacier pace of the Senate in the last 20 years. The media would have you believe the democrats are well on their way full blown communism, but the reality is the party self-sabotaged their own $15 minimum wage proposal and managed to be less generous than Trump on stimulus checks.
If the Federal Reserve decided to implement capital controls, I doubt it would happen democratically. It's more likely that you would wake up one day and all the major banks would have limits on how much gold you could purchase in a year for "liability reasons". I'm sure a Senator or two would scream, but the next week there would be the next culture war story with Ted Cruz complaining about MTV.