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People who can't afford to lose their jobs generally aren't able to start businesses and produce revolutionary innovation. Want more innovation? Kill monopolies

People who can't afford to lose their jobs generally aren't able to start businesses and produce revolutionary innovation. Want more innovation? Kill monopolies, increase income equality. http://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2017-08-30/zillionaire-to-other-zillionaires-pay-up/111964/@00:00 http://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2017-08-30/zillionaire-to-oth...

vorotato 9y ago
Turns out the most libertarian is the left libertarian :p.
dmitrygr 9y ago
You proved my point (Sadly) Also I do not want more (or less) innovation. I want freedom for people to engage in business as they see fit. Until you own Google, your opinion on breaking it up is meaningless. Want to break something up? Build your own company and then break it up. (Or enjoy others telling you that what you built with your own effort needs to be taken away from you and broken into pieces).
- heurist 9y ago
  Many founders are pushed out of their companies pretty early on if they're successful. The shareholders are the owners and their focus is on improving ROI, not coddling your baby. Being too attached as a founder will stunt the business's revenue growth. That's fine if you are a lifestyle business or haven't raised significant capital, but those aren't the kinds of businesses you're talking about. I've been building a business for the last two years and I know how hard it is. I reject your assertion that I cannot have an opinion on breaking up major corporations. You're missing the part where American businesses are built under the protection of the US government, leveraging public infrastructure to aid their growth. They have no right to existence beyond that which is given to them by law. Monopolies hold back our economy. We're losing ground internationally because mature businesses do not contribute as much to society as startups, and we have far too many mature businesses running things. Aging firms become hard and crusty, change slows, organizations begin failing, and eventually they die from atrophy. That's not an opinion, it's fact. Geoffrey West's book "Scale" explains why. With that in mind, there are many reasons founders should be fine with limitations. 1) A business's legacy will carry further if it is broken into smaller, more agile units split across multiple industries, 2) the business will contribute more to the society which houses it, 3) more people will be employed due to overhead required for running a business, 4) there can be reasonable competition over the goods or services provided, creating higher quality products and greater overall GDP, leading to healthier economies where 5) it is easier for an existing business to compete in new markets, and 6) it is easier for anyone to start a business, increasing overall personal freedom. As a founder I want all of those things. It creates a stronger workforce, stronger markets, weaker competition, and improves my standing relative to the rest of the world. The odds of me becoming a megacorp are very low, but the odds of me failing in a market controlled by megacorps is high. I'll take the higher odds of success if it means not growing beyond a certain point that very few of us will ever reach anyway. If you want people to have freedom, you should want to cap business growth. By allowing or promoting monopolies you're giving maybe ten or twenty thousand people all the freedom in the world, while letting the rest languish in their corporation-defined cages. For me it's heartbreaking to see good people so tightly constrained that they can't even choose what they wear each day, what time they wake up, what they can say and do for 8-12 hours a day. If you cap growth while promoting competition and small businesses then you're giving everyone else an opportunity to decide how to live their own lives. Also, allowing one to "engage in business as they see fit" is dangerous. What if they want to dump poisonous sludge in your water source to cut costs? Would you feel the same way?

vorotato 9y ago

Turns out the most libertarian is the left libertarian :p.

dmitrygr 9y ago

You proved my point (Sadly) Also I do not want more (or less) innovation. I want freedom for people to engage in business as they see fit. Until you own Google, your opinion on breaking it up is meaningless. Want to break something up? Build your own company and then break it up. (Or enjoy others telling you that what you built with your own effort needs to be taken away from you and broken into pieces).

heurist 9y ago
Many founders are pushed out of their companies pretty early on if they're successful. The shareholders are the owners and their focus is on improving ROI, not coddling your baby. Being too attached as a founder will stunt the business's revenue growth. That's fine if you are a lifestyle business or haven't raised significant capital, but those aren't the kinds of businesses you're talking about. I've been building a business for the last two years and I know how hard it is. I reject your assertion that I cannot have an opinion on breaking up major corporations. You're missing the part where American businesses are built under the protection of the US government, leveraging public infrastructure to aid their growth. They have no right to existence beyond that which is given to them by law. Monopolies hold back our economy. We're losing ground internationally because mature businesses do not contribute as much to society as startups, and we have far too many mature businesses running things. Aging firms become hard and crusty, change slows, organizations begin failing, and eventually they die from atrophy. That's not an opinion, it's fact. Geoffrey West's book "Scale" explains why. With that in mind, there are many reasons founders should be fine with limitations. 1) A business's legacy will carry further if it is broken into smaller, more agile units split across multiple industries, 2) the business will contribute more to the society which houses it, 3) more people will be employed due to overhead required for running a business, 4) there can be reasonable competition over the goods or services provided, creating higher quality products and greater overall GDP, leading to healthier economies where 5) it is easier for an existing business to compete in new markets, and 6) it is easier for anyone to start a business, increasing overall personal freedom. As a founder I want all of those things. It creates a stronger workforce, stronger markets, weaker competition, and improves my standing relative to the rest of the world. The odds of me becoming a megacorp are very low, but the odds of me failing in a market controlled by megacorps is high. I'll take the higher odds of success if it means not growing beyond a certain point that very few of us will ever reach anyway. If you want people to have freedom, you should want to cap business growth. By allowing or promoting monopolies you're giving maybe ten or twenty thousand people all the freedom in the world, while letting the rest languish in their corporation-defined cages. For me it's heartbreaking to see good people so tightly constrained that they can't even choose what they wear each day, what time they wake up, what they can say and do for 8-12 hours a day. If you cap growth while promoting competition and small businesses then you're giving everyone else an opportunity to decide how to live their own lives. Also, allowing one to "engage in business as they see fit" is dangerous. What if they want to dump poisonous sludge in your water source to cut costs? Would you feel the same way?