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That's the _worst_ idea I've heard this week. First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do. Second, the effect of this w

That's the _worst_ idea I've heard this week. First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do. Second, the effect of this would be to further stifle competition from smaller businesses. Which is also not something that free societies do. I question the motives of the author.

kagamine 9y ago
You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon, Uber etc have been set up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom? Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an distribution powerhouse I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing 'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies to pay some tax though.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  >From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a government monopoly running major industries, by outlawing private citizens from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's. Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and begin providing web services to the people within the government's jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable definition of freedom? We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean completely different things to different people, because we would no longer follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.
  - panic 9y ago
    The whole point is that these companies are inherently resistant to competition. Nationalization doesn't require limiting access to any other service or restricting competition in any way.
    - CryptoPunk 9y ago
      Then fund a public option. Better yet, make the public option a distributed protocol. Then no seizures of private property, laws prohibiting private enterprise, or internet firewalls to prevent foreign service providers from rendering their service to local residents, would be needed.
    - simonh 9y ago
      In which case there is no need to nationalise, because by definition if another competitor can be created then the government can create one itself. All nationalising would do is give the government a leg-up in having an existing user base. In practice government inertia would lead to the service atrophying and becoming outdated and overburdened with bureaucratic controls and costs. Page & Brin, Bezos and Zuckerberg (or someone new) would each raise capital, start their own competing services and in a few years time we'd be back where we started. This whole idea is so utterly misconceived and pointless it blows my mind how many people here are trying to justify or defend it. Unless you actively regulated to prohibit competing private services, it would be doomed from he start and if such regulation was enforced - literally banning other search engines including Bing, banning other social networks, banning any other online retail businesses, the lurch towards dystopianism would create a very different world to the one we live in. Even China hadn't come even close to anything like that.
- featherverse 9y ago
  > You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. Uh... no offense intended, that's a failure of your comprehension abilities, and not my responsibility to satisfy. Your confusion amounts to "why is the sky blue?" Because it's blue, Billy. Because it's blue.
prewett 9y ago
Regulation, e.g. of utilities, in the in U.S. is sort of a form of nationalization. Technically they are not nationalized, but since they have all kinds of requirements, including needing to apply for rate changes, they aren't exactly normal, either. And if you don't have control of your prices, do you really have a capitalistic business? But aside from that, 3 people at Google get to effectively dictate what the world will see on the Internet via the top 10 on the search. 1 guy at Facebook gets to dictate what is on my Facebook page. (I certainly don't get any choice in the matter, beyond banning people) This sounds a lot like a dictatorship, and is this what a free society does? Might a free society decide that it is in the society's best interest to have social media be governed by elected officials, and to not be scientifically designed (via A/B testing) to be addictive?
- hueving 9y ago
  >This sounds a lot like a dictatorship, and is this what a free society does? Rediculous, nobody is forcing you to use Google or Facebook.
  - vacri 9y ago
    It's extremely difficult for a regular user to use the web without bouncing into something provided by one of those two groups.
  - honestoHeminway 9y ago
    Everything is forcing you to use Google and Facebook. The market, the public who voted with there feet. You recive invitations to classes via facebook. There is no freedom of choice in a monopoly where opting out equals social death.
  - ajdlinux 9y ago
    Nobody's forcing in the sense of directly threatening you if you don't use Google or Facebook, that is true. But: (a) particularly with regards to social networking, the social pressure to use walled-garden sites like Facebook can be very, very strong (b) if you're a Normal Person(tm), it can be hard to know what else to do other than use the same services that everyone else uses and that are being actively marketed to you. Sure, at the individual level, using Google and Facebook services (as I myself do) is still a voluntary, consensual transaction, but there may well be societal-level effects that look fairly close to those of traditional monopolies.
kayman 9y ago
Agreed 100%. Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized? And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes.
- yahna 9y ago
  Look, a temporarily embarrassed unicorn founder. This is the same logic that people use to argue against the Estate tax.
- jhasse 9y ago
  > Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized? Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies. > And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes. That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing?
  - kayman 9y ago
    > That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing? I meant where do we draw the line?
    - jhasse 9y ago
      We're already drawing a line since some things are already nationalized. We'd just need to move it.
  - featherverse 9y ago
    > Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies. there are so many reasons it would literally fill hours of political philosophy and economics debate. and has. These debates have been had. At length, and for many years.
yahna 9y ago
> First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do. Sure it is. America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.
- ldp01 9y ago
  Yeah, it's total nonsense. The current government in my state won on a platform of not privatising the main electrical utility.
- featherverse 9y ago
  > America does not hold a monopoly on freedom. If you spend any real time exploring the concept of freedom and how to measure it, America is in fact the most free nation in the world. That doesn't mean America holds a monopoly on freedom, it means America is setting the example that others follow, and will continue to until another nation offers it's citizens quantifiably more freedom than America does. And examining the current geo-political climates, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
  - yahna 9y ago
    Well you guys are certainly number 1 in arrogance.

kagamine 9y ago

You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon, Uber etc have been set up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom? Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an distribution powerhouse I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing 'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies to pay some tax though.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
>From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom". I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a government monopoly running major industries, by outlawing private citizens from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's. Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and begin providing web services to the people within the government's jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable definition of freedom? We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean completely different things to different people, because we would no longer follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.
- panic 9y ago
  The whole point is that these companies are inherently resistant to competition. Nationalization doesn't require limiting access to any other service or restricting competition in any way.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    Then fund a public option. Better yet, make the public option a distributed protocol. Then no seizures of private property, laws prohibiting private enterprise, or internet firewalls to prevent foreign service providers from rendering their service to local residents, would be needed.
  - simonh 9y ago
    In which case there is no need to nationalise, because by definition if another competitor can be created then the government can create one itself. All nationalising would do is give the government a leg-up in having an existing user base. In practice government inertia would lead to the service atrophying and becoming outdated and overburdened with bureaucratic controls and costs. Page & Brin, Bezos and Zuckerberg (or someone new) would each raise capital, start their own competing services and in a few years time we'd be back where we started. This whole idea is so utterly misconceived and pointless it blows my mind how many people here are trying to justify or defend it. Unless you actively regulated to prohibit competing private services, it would be doomed from he start and if such regulation was enforced - literally banning other search engines including Bing, banning other social networks, banning any other online retail businesses, the lurch towards dystopianism would create a very different world to the one we live in. Even China hadn't come even close to anything like that.
featherverse 9y ago
> You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. Uh... no offense intended, that's a failure of your comprehension abilities, and not my responsibility to satisfy. Your confusion amounts to "why is the sky blue?" Because it's blue, Billy. Because it's blue.

prewett 9y ago

Regulation, e.g. of utilities, in the in U.S. is sort of a form of nationalization. Technically they are not nationalized, but since they have all kinds of requirements, including needing to apply for rate changes, they aren't exactly normal, either. And if you don't have control of your prices, do you really have a capitalistic business? But aside from that, 3 people at Google get to effectively dictate what the world will see on the Internet via the top 10 on the search. 1 guy at Facebook gets to dictate what is on my Facebook page. (I certainly don't get any choice in the matter, beyond banning people) This sounds a lot like a dictatorship, and is this what a free society does? Might a free society decide that it is in the society's best interest to have social media be governed by elected officials, and to not be scientifically designed (via A/B testing) to be addictive?

hueving 9y ago
>This sounds a lot like a dictatorship, and is this what a free society does? Rediculous, nobody is forcing you to use Google or Facebook.
- vacri 9y ago
  It's extremely difficult for a regular user to use the web without bouncing into something provided by one of those two groups.
- honestoHeminway 9y ago
  Everything is forcing you to use Google and Facebook. The market, the public who voted with there feet. You recive invitations to classes via facebook. There is no freedom of choice in a monopoly where opting out equals social death.
- ajdlinux 9y ago
  Nobody's forcing in the sense of directly threatening you if you don't use Google or Facebook, that is true. But: (a) particularly with regards to social networking, the social pressure to use walled-garden sites like Facebook can be very, very strong (b) if you're a Normal Person(tm), it can be hard to know what else to do other than use the same services that everyone else uses and that are being actively marketed to you. Sure, at the individual level, using Google and Facebook services (as I myself do) is still a voluntary, consensual transaction, but there may well be societal-level effects that look fairly close to those of traditional monopolies.

kayman 9y ago

Agreed 100%. Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized? And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes.

yahna 9y ago
Look, a temporarily embarrassed unicorn founder. This is the same logic that people use to argue against the Estate tax.
jhasse 9y ago
> Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized? Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies. > And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes. That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing?
- kayman 9y ago
  > That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing? I meant where do we draw the line?
  - jhasse 9y ago
    We're already drawing a line since some things are already nationalized. We'd just need to move it.
- featherverse 9y ago
  > Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies. there are so many reasons it would literally fill hours of political philosophy and economics debate. and has. These debates have been had. At length, and for many years.

yahna 9y ago

> First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do. Sure it is. America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.

ldp01 9y ago
Yeah, it's total nonsense. The current government in my state won on a platform of not privatising the main electrical utility.
featherverse 9y ago
> America does not hold a monopoly on freedom. If you spend any real time exploring the concept of freedom and how to measure it, America is in fact the most free nation in the world. That doesn't mean America holds a monopoly on freedom, it means America is setting the example that others follow, and will continue to until another nation offers it's citizens quantifiably more freedom than America does. And examining the current geo-political climates, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
- yahna 9y ago
  Well you guys are certainly number 1 in arrogance.