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America has a corruption problem. The ability for companies to vertically integrate and essentially make smaller businesses non-competitive can only occur when

America has a corruption problem. The ability for companies to vertically integrate and essentially make smaller businesses non-competitive can only occur when you don't have to pay the taxes your smaller competitors have to pay and don't have to obey the same laws your competitors have to obey. We have a systemic corruption problem (manifested in lobbying) coupled with greed on scales we've never seen before. Everything else is just a symptom of that problem.

emodendroket 9y ago
Well, I wouldn't say that. One problem with monopolies is they eventually grow so huge that they have tremendous influence on politics.
ashark 9y ago
Our preference for (relatively) high levels of local control (and the resulting tiered cake of tax jurisdictions and regulatory domains) makes our system incredibly vulnerable to race-to-the-bottom behavior when confronted with powerful non-state actors (corporations). Our fear of a hypothetical (though, to be clear, in other times and places realized) evil state leaves us with a host of real, everyday stresses, annoyances, and inefficiencies. It's a drag on GDP and, especially, on quality of life.
- dforrestwilson 9y ago
  Yup. Amazon receiving 238 bids of localities falling over themselves to handover tax credits and other goodies is the example I've been thinking about recently. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-headquarters/amazon-receives-238-proposals-for-its-second-headquarters-idUSKBN1CS21O https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-headquarters/a... How to fix it though?
  - walshemj 9y ago
    unfortunetly you would have to radically reform the entire political system and take a lot of powers away from states eg single sales tax, a single set of employment law. Unfortunately the states are not turkeys voting for Christmas
  - ashark 9y ago
    > How to fix it though? Don't think we can. We're more likely to fix one of our other big, fundamental problems—the two party system + gerrymandering, for which proportional representation or any of several other schemes would be a good fix—than we are that, and I'd say the odds of our fixing that this century are maybe 50/50. We have no stomach (or mind...) for questioning such foundational premises of our system in the face of something as abstract and high-falutin' as a kind of political root-cause analysis, and aside from that we have too many states-can't-possibly-do-anything-right-ever-evidence-be-damned-no-really-I-proved-it-from-first-principles-it's-just-like-math folks running around.
    - zanny 9y ago
      The abundance of persons of the latter mentioned mindset are an intentional product of the power structure, though. Ignorance and indoctrination combined create an army you can oppress and use to keep the oppressed fighting amongst themselves. You just blame your oppressions on the "other". I don't think you can save that many people when there are so many of them. It becomes cultural. Their identities are defined by their conviction. In earlier times, that would be the point where you leave the society and go somewhere else, but there is really no where left to go on Earth - every country has their own flavor of brooding fundamentalists supporting some faction of the government through propagandized anti-intellectualism.
  - Brakenshire 9y ago
    The EU has a set of laws called State Aid, which disallows member states from subsidizing business to the detriment of their competitors (either other businesses or other states). Government can improve infrastructure, but cannot literally hand out cash to build a factory, or anything like that. This exists even though EU nation states have far more individual power than US states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid_(European_Union) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid_(European_Union)
    - charlesdm 9y ago
      In reality, these days member states will introduce laws for certain players that then anyone can use. It's not state aid then, but the result is the same. For example, Belgium recently updated certain tax laws to reduce the amount of withholding tax payable by certain major foreign investors, to keep the AB Inbev holding company in Belgium instead of letting the shareholders move their holding entity to the UK.
    - privateprofile 9y ago
      > Government can improve infrastructure, but cannot literally hand out cash to build a factory, or anything like that. Yes, because such "subsidies" would create competition for companies from more developed EU countries, the same countries that drive the acceptance of new EU members. Removing these obstacles crushed local industry, which is why less developed countries ended up with close to zero industrial production after joining the EU (thus starting the social, employment and competitiveness problems most smaller EU nations are facing). Nevertheless, EU nations keep subsidizing "selected" businesses, especially for big foreign companies outsourcing their operations, using tax benefits.
      - Brakenshire 9y ago
        > Removing these obstacles crushed local industry, which is why less developed countries ended up with close to zero industrial production after joining the EU (thus starting the social, employment and competitiveness problems most smaller EU nations are facing). These sorts of talking points exist everywhere, in the West and in the East, state aid is one of the most attacked elements of the EU. Actually the talking point is near identical in the UK, that manufacturing has died because the government hasn't been able to step in (in effect, to prop up uncompetitive industries). Manufacturing has in fact plummeted in most developed countries, and it's easy for governments to pass the blame onto the EU.
  - Maarten88 9y ago
    > How to fix it though? If tax agencies would just stop accepting any "transfer pricing" BS from multinational corporations, and simply divide their total net profit (wherever) by the share of the national market and base corporate tax on that, I think that would be a start. Localities competing for business is i.m.o. much less problematic: it's a one-time write-off, there is legislation, and it has to be "sold" to tax-payers.
- snomad 9y ago
  Just a minor clarification to your point. In "industry" towns like the Bay Area, Detroit, and Chicago - corporations are definitely the powerful non-state actors. Outside of those though, their are many cities of considerable size where local developers hold the most sway. These local developers behave and are motivated by different things then the mega corps.
anomie31 9y ago
Why do you believe economies of scale doesn't enable this?
oconnor663 9y ago
> The ability for companies to vertically integrate and essentially make smaller businesses non-competitive can only occur when you don't have to pay the taxes your smaller competitors have to pay and don't have to obey the same laws your competitors have to obey. That sounds a little too extreme. Has vertical integration never occurred without the help of tax law?
- refurb 9y ago
  It's a little odd of a comment as well since there is a plethora of small business incentives that the big guys don't get. It's much more complicated that what the OP laid out.
- zanny 9y ago
  Generally if your economy is healthy the general case should be that no part of a supply chain can ever get rich enough to outright buy another piece. If any one part was making too generous a profit that could build that kind of war chest, low barriers to entry and competition would quickly propagate alternatives that took less profit. This is, however, why you cannot just have a strict free market. Some industries emerge - and will emerge - that are naturally hard to enter and compete in. But at the same time, you need to have the lightest touch necessary, because the same regulatory apparatus can (and does in spades today) be abused to prevent competition by industry incumbents. But again, it is hard to accumulate the capital or scale to control government unless you have one of those non-competitive revenue streams. The important historic realization is that we have failed to police businesses that had such extreme margins, probably because at the time those invested in such businesses felt it was just the success of the American market instead of being a wound in society that would grow infected.
sandworm101 9y ago
I think it goes a step deeper. Imho the issue starts with the fundamental distrust of government. Lacking the ability to see government as a valid leader, Americans turn to corporations and billionaires. They really do believe that Apple and Dow chemical can do a better job leading the country than any elected politician. They are not worried about the monopolies. They should be, any economist would agree that monopolies are not good for consumers, but the average person is not a rational economist. I don't think Americans believe lobbying is bad. They want to be led by corporations and see lobbying as the legitimate means for them to lead.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  As an American who speaks to a lot of other Americans, this is definitely not the mentality that I'm seeing around me. Most people I know are becoming cynical about growing corporate control of our government and increasing income inequality. Pretty much everyone I know is worried about the monopolies.
- wav-part 9y ago
  This thread is confusing State granted monopoly with Market granted monopoly. Economists usually talks about the former.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    > This thread is confusing State granted monopoly with Market granted monopoly. Economists usually talks about the former. Can you really tease those apart in our mixed economy? Look at ISP monopolies, or the bizarre state of the "deregulated" electricity market and what remains of the long-distance telephone market. Or take pharma, where tremendous resources are needed to comply with regulation. Or the -- tremendous scare quotes required -- "marketplace" for health care. In a mixed economy, monopoly exists because of state and market.
    - wav-part 9y ago
      In all your examples, state acts as gate-keeper and these are local/national industries. If you have a multi-national company that is monopoly, its very likely to be market granted monopoly. > In a mixed economy, monopoly exists because of state and market. No. We live in global economy. Most companies have to compete globally. You might get favours from few countries but not most. Note whether your home country gives you a boost or not, is irrelevent. The success in a foreign country without its govt's blessing, is the question.
adventured 9y ago
Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple would be extraordinarily profitable even if they were paying 26% corporate income tax rates. Your entire premise collapses right there. Facebook will generate near $20 billion in earnings before tax for fiscal 2017. You're positing that if they pay $6 billion in taxes, instead of $4 billion, then their monopoly will unwind or somehow their competitors will finally be able to catch up (yeah, it's just not fair, the tax rate that Snap is paying). Now apply the exact same thing to the other tech giants (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, etc). It's just as far-fetched with them as it is Facebook.
- jack9 9y ago
  > Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple would be extraordinarily profitable even if they were paying 26% corporate income tax rates. Your entire premise collapses right there. You are flat wrong. The integration has already occurred. The corruption is currently ingrained. Being able to source from your own penny factories in another country put many of the behemoths into their market dominant position or solidified them. Facebook is an odd duck which leveraged capital wisely. Amazon had decades of massive loses (revenue-wise) until, roughly, AWS took off. The capital markets favor bigger players at almost every turn and smaller successful companies are consumed and destroyed at a shocking rate after they rise above a starting locality. Microsoft used to afford that kind of market attrition, but now it's been largely Yahoo, Google, Alibaba, etc.
curiousgeorgio 9y ago
Think of it this way: it's not that the larger companies are breaking the laws or simply not paying taxes that they owe - they're just being more innovative in how they approach those things. In a global economy, when there's pressure to pay lower wages by outsourcing labor, pay lower taxes by organizing some or all of the company abroad, or exploit loopholes in domestic laws for greater efficiency, that's just what you're going to do (given enough expertise and resources). It's laughable to think a country could solve any of those things through stricter legislation; that will simply encourage those companies to move more of their operations to jurisdictions with more advantageous laws/taxes/labor/etc. So how do you "level the playing field"? One way would be bringing those advantages to smaller companies through businesses that exploit those same loopholes / tax strategies, providing them as services to companies who otherwise couldn't afford doing it themselves (i.e., exploiting legal loopholes as-a-service, international tax strategies as-a-service, etc). Or, you embrace the global economy, specialize in what your country can do most efficiently (hint: it's not manufacturing anymore in the US), and make it advantageous for companies to keep operating domestically. You lower taxes for everyone, so even the companies with few resources can enjoy the eased financial burden of taxes that normally only the big guys could avoid. In short, you compete globally rather than stick your head in the sand pretending that your country is somehow isolated from the rest of the world and you can fix everything through legislation.
- autokad 9y ago
  so if if someone takes performance enhancing drugs that has not yet been discovered isn't cheating, they are being innovative. treat it like the olympics. if an athlete that takes a performance enhancing drug that has yet to be prohibited, they still loose their medals and cannot compete.
  - curiousgeorgio 9y ago
    Except this game isn't governed by just one body. It's a global economy, so even if your own country "strips your medals", you just move to the country that won't do that.
abandonliberty 9y ago
What you have is natural selection. Systemic corruption is itself a deterministic outcome/symptom when corruption is an adaptive trait. Unfortunately many undesirable behaviors are adaptive: the risk-adjusted rate of return is positive. 'Bad actors' have much more to gain from engaging in them than watchdogs have in stopping it. You will always lose the fight against corruption in the long run because as the war goes on you get weaker and they get stronger. This is a fundamental issue with organizational design (and democracy). Highly recommended further reading/viewing: Rules for rulers is very helpful at understanding this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Iron law of Oligarchy (the deterministic outcome of democracy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
- alasdair_ 9y ago
  From the Iron Law of Oligarchy page: "no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy" I'm not sure this is proven yet. Certainly in the past, I'd have agreed, but with communication via the Internet making realtime decision-making between all members of a democracy possible, I think direct democracy is theoretically possible at least. If not absolutely direct, then at least having the ability to instantly revoke a mandate from someone you have entrusted could go a low way to limiting the power of an oligarchy, as could entrusting different individuals and groups with a single person's vote, depending on the issue. For example, maybe I'd trust a particular economist to vote on my behalf for specific economic proposals, but I'd want Greenpeace to vote on my behalf for anything to do with, say, baby seal clubbing. So long as the individuals can instantly take back the voting power they have entrusted to someone else, a reasonable semblance of direct democracy could work. In practice, of course, it would be a hell of a mess to get everything functional, I just don't buy the notion that it's impossible in a world where everyone can communicate with everyone else essentially for free.
  - dfee 9y ago
    Essentially for free is not “for free”. For example, the best way many people have to communicate with their peers is Facebook. But A) their peers aren’t the ones seeding the discussions, and B) their communication is filtered for signals like “vitality”. More mundane, but important ideas, are a bit squashed on a platform like that. Picking on Facebook because they’re the biggest, but Twitter appears to be worse on every axis, as it continues to evolve to favor clout.
bythckr 9y ago
"America is NOT corrupt. Every corrupt practice is being lobbied to be legalized. USA has legalized corruption." - a quip I heard somewhere.
irrational 9y ago
I agree with what you said, except for the "greed on scales we've never seen before". I think it's pretty clear, if you look back at the last 5,000 years of history that we've clearly seen greed on the same scale (or greater) than what we are seeing right now. It seems to be endemic to the human condition.
- Animats 9y ago
  The last time income concentration in the US looked like this was around 1900. That generated the union movement and interest in socialism and communism. (This time we got Trump. Oops.)
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    A lot of people forget that fascism had an overtly anti-capitalist attitude, espoused in propaganda and racial imagery (take a look at what a factory boss looked like in Nazi propaganda and you'll understand what I'm trying to say). And a program, too, that of subservience to the State. However, I'm not saying it wasn't capitalistic in effect, or anything like that. Only that a system breakdown leads people to seek out extremes. In the late 19th and early 20th century there were ideologies in Europe and the U.S. that were available to cling on to, whether you were a union member, a soldier returned from a devastating war, or a deeply religious person, something was there to explain the order. Today we have Facebook news (60%, is it, of Americans get their news primarily from there?). We have programmatic advertising, a feedback loop of information being sent to our attention and our behaviors being tracked and sending back datapoints for further optimized tracking... I'm not sure what this says about the state of ideology and the tremendous disunity in western society compared to 100 years ago, in the sense of people coming together under the banner of coherent ideas... But it'd make an interesting thesis paper.
  - irrational 9y ago
    That's nothing compared to the income concentration in Old Kingdom Egypt. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
nikolay 9y ago
I see more competition possible in some much more corrupt countries, so, maybe that's not exactly the root cause.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
The bigger problem is we're naive and/or completely unwilling to admit we have a corruption problem. US exceptionalism kinda dictates that corruption is a problem other (lesser) countries have. But certainly not here.

emodendroket 9y ago

Well, I wouldn't say that. One problem with monopolies is they eventually grow so huge that they have tremendous influence on politics.

ashark 9y ago

Our preference for (relatively) high levels of local control (and the resulting tiered cake of tax jurisdictions and regulatory domains) makes our system incredibly vulnerable to race-to-the-bottom behavior when confronted with powerful non-state actors (corporations). Our fear of a hypothetical (though, to be clear, in other times and places realized) evil state leaves us with a host of real, everyday stresses, annoyances, and inefficiencies. It's a drag on GDP and, especially, on quality of life.

dforrestwilson 9y ago
Yup. Amazon receiving 238 bids of localities falling over themselves to handover tax credits and other goodies is the example I've been thinking about recently. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-headquarters/amazon-receives-238-proposals-for-its-second-headquarters-idUSKBN1CS21O https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-headquarters/a... How to fix it though?
- walshemj 9y ago
  unfortunetly you would have to radically reform the entire political system and take a lot of powers away from states eg single sales tax, a single set of employment law. Unfortunately the states are not turkeys voting for Christmas
- ashark 9y ago
  > How to fix it though? Don't think we can. We're more likely to fix one of our other big, fundamental problems—the two party system + gerrymandering, for which proportional representation or any of several other schemes would be a good fix—than we are that, and I'd say the odds of our fixing that this century are maybe 50/50. We have no stomach (or mind...) for questioning such foundational premises of our system in the face of something as abstract and high-falutin' as a kind of political root-cause analysis, and aside from that we have too many states-can't-possibly-do-anything-right-ever-evidence-be-damned-no-really-I-proved-it-from-first-principles-it's-just-like-math folks running around.
  - zanny 9y ago
    The abundance of persons of the latter mentioned mindset are an intentional product of the power structure, though. Ignorance and indoctrination combined create an army you can oppress and use to keep the oppressed fighting amongst themselves. You just blame your oppressions on the "other". I don't think you can save that many people when there are so many of them. It becomes cultural. Their identities are defined by their conviction. In earlier times, that would be the point where you leave the society and go somewhere else, but there is really no where left to go on Earth - every country has their own flavor of brooding fundamentalists supporting some faction of the government through propagandized anti-intellectualism.
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  The EU has a set of laws called State Aid, which disallows member states from subsidizing business to the detriment of their competitors (either other businesses or other states). Government can improve infrastructure, but cannot literally hand out cash to build a factory, or anything like that. This exists even though EU nation states have far more individual power than US states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid_(European_Union) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid_(European_Union)
  - charlesdm 9y ago
    In reality, these days member states will introduce laws for certain players that then anyone can use. It's not state aid then, but the result is the same. For example, Belgium recently updated certain tax laws to reduce the amount of withholding tax payable by certain major foreign investors, to keep the AB Inbev holding company in Belgium instead of letting the shareholders move their holding entity to the UK.
  - privateprofile 9y ago
    > Government can improve infrastructure, but cannot literally hand out cash to build a factory, or anything like that. Yes, because such "subsidies" would create competition for companies from more developed EU countries, the same countries that drive the acceptance of new EU members. Removing these obstacles crushed local industry, which is why less developed countries ended up with close to zero industrial production after joining the EU (thus starting the social, employment and competitiveness problems most smaller EU nations are facing). Nevertheless, EU nations keep subsidizing "selected" businesses, especially for big foreign companies outsourcing their operations, using tax benefits.
    - Brakenshire 9y ago
      > Removing these obstacles crushed local industry, which is why less developed countries ended up with close to zero industrial production after joining the EU (thus starting the social, employment and competitiveness problems most smaller EU nations are facing). These sorts of talking points exist everywhere, in the West and in the East, state aid is one of the most attacked elements of the EU. Actually the talking point is near identical in the UK, that manufacturing has died because the government hasn't been able to step in (in effect, to prop up uncompetitive industries). Manufacturing has in fact plummeted in most developed countries, and it's easy for governments to pass the blame onto the EU.
- Maarten88 9y ago
  > How to fix it though? If tax agencies would just stop accepting any "transfer pricing" BS from multinational corporations, and simply divide their total net profit (wherever) by the share of the national market and base corporate tax on that, I think that would be a start. Localities competing for business is i.m.o. much less problematic: it's a one-time write-off, there is legislation, and it has to be "sold" to tax-payers.
snomad 9y ago
Just a minor clarification to your point. In "industry" towns like the Bay Area, Detroit, and Chicago - corporations are definitely the powerful non-state actors. Outside of those though, their are many cities of considerable size where local developers hold the most sway. These local developers behave and are motivated by different things then the mega corps.

anomie31 9y ago

Why do you believe economies of scale doesn't enable this?

oconnor663 9y ago

> The ability for companies to vertically integrate and essentially make smaller businesses non-competitive can only occur when you don't have to pay the taxes your smaller competitors have to pay and don't have to obey the same laws your competitors have to obey. That sounds a little too extreme. Has vertical integration never occurred without the help of tax law?

refurb 9y ago
It's a little odd of a comment as well since there is a plethora of small business incentives that the big guys don't get. It's much more complicated that what the OP laid out.
zanny 9y ago
Generally if your economy is healthy the general case should be that no part of a supply chain can ever get rich enough to outright buy another piece. If any one part was making too generous a profit that could build that kind of war chest, low barriers to entry and competition would quickly propagate alternatives that took less profit. This is, however, why you cannot just have a strict free market. Some industries emerge - and will emerge - that are naturally hard to enter and compete in. But at the same time, you need to have the lightest touch necessary, because the same regulatory apparatus can (and does in spades today) be abused to prevent competition by industry incumbents. But again, it is hard to accumulate the capital or scale to control government unless you have one of those non-competitive revenue streams. The important historic realization is that we have failed to police businesses that had such extreme margins, probably because at the time those invested in such businesses felt it was just the success of the American market instead of being a wound in society that would grow infected.

sandworm101 9y ago

I think it goes a step deeper. Imho the issue starts with the fundamental distrust of government. Lacking the ability to see government as a valid leader, Americans turn to corporations and billionaires. They really do believe that Apple and Dow chemical can do a better job leading the country than any elected politician. They are not worried about the monopolies. They should be, any economist would agree that monopolies are not good for consumers, but the average person is not a rational economist. I don't think Americans believe lobbying is bad. They want to be led by corporations and see lobbying as the legitimate means for them to lead.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
As an American who speaks to a lot of other Americans, this is definitely not the mentality that I'm seeing around me. Most people I know are becoming cynical about growing corporate control of our government and increasing income inequality. Pretty much everyone I know is worried about the monopolies.
wav-part 9y ago
This thread is confusing State granted monopoly with Market granted monopoly. Economists usually talks about the former.
- sevensor 9y ago
  > This thread is confusing State granted monopoly with Market granted monopoly. Economists usually talks about the former. Can you really tease those apart in our mixed economy? Look at ISP monopolies, or the bizarre state of the "deregulated" electricity market and what remains of the long-distance telephone market. Or take pharma, where tremendous resources are needed to comply with regulation. Or the -- tremendous scare quotes required -- "marketplace" for health care. In a mixed economy, monopoly exists because of state and market.
  - wav-part 9y ago
    In all your examples, state acts as gate-keeper and these are local/national industries. If you have a multi-national company that is monopoly, its very likely to be market granted monopoly. > In a mixed economy, monopoly exists because of state and market. No. We live in global economy. Most companies have to compete globally. You might get favours from few countries but not most. Note whether your home country gives you a boost or not, is irrelevent. The success in a foreign country without its govt's blessing, is the question.

adventured 9y ago

Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple would be extraordinarily profitable even if they were paying 26% corporate income tax rates. Your entire premise collapses right there. Facebook will generate near $20 billion in earnings before tax for fiscal 2017. You're positing that if they pay $6 billion in taxes, instead of $4 billion, then their monopoly will unwind or somehow their competitors will finally be able to catch up (yeah, it's just not fair, the tax rate that Snap is paying). Now apply the exact same thing to the other tech giants (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, etc). It's just as far-fetched with them as it is Facebook.

jack9 9y ago
> Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple would be extraordinarily profitable even if they were paying 26% corporate income tax rates. Your entire premise collapses right there. You are flat wrong. The integration has already occurred. The corruption is currently ingrained. Being able to source from your own penny factories in another country put many of the behemoths into their market dominant position or solidified them. Facebook is an odd duck which leveraged capital wisely. Amazon had decades of massive loses (revenue-wise) until, roughly, AWS took off. The capital markets favor bigger players at almost every turn and smaller successful companies are consumed and destroyed at a shocking rate after they rise above a starting locality. Microsoft used to afford that kind of market attrition, but now it's been largely Yahoo, Google, Alibaba, etc.

curiousgeorgio 9y ago

Think of it this way: it's not that the larger companies are breaking the laws or simply not paying taxes that they owe - they're just being more innovative in how they approach those things. In a global economy, when there's pressure to pay lower wages by outsourcing labor, pay lower taxes by organizing some or all of the company abroad, or exploit loopholes in domestic laws for greater efficiency, that's just what you're going to do (given enough expertise and resources). It's laughable to think a country could solve any of those things through stricter legislation; that will simply encourage those companies to move more of their operations to jurisdictions with more advantageous laws/taxes/labor/etc. So how do you "level the playing field"? One way would be bringing those advantages to smaller companies through businesses that exploit those same loopholes / tax strategies, providing them as services to companies who otherwise couldn't afford doing it themselves (i.e., exploiting legal loopholes as-a-service, international tax strategies as-a-service, etc). Or, you embrace the global economy, specialize in what your country can do most efficiently (hint: it's not manufacturing anymore in the US), and make it advantageous for companies to keep operating domestically. You lower taxes for everyone, so even the companies with few resources can enjoy the eased financial burden of taxes that normally only the big guys could avoid. In short, you compete globally rather than stick your head in the sand pretending that your country is somehow isolated from the rest of the world and you can fix everything through legislation.

autokad 9y ago
so if if someone takes performance enhancing drugs that has not yet been discovered isn't cheating, they are being innovative. treat it like the olympics. if an athlete that takes a performance enhancing drug that has yet to be prohibited, they still loose their medals and cannot compete.
- curiousgeorgio 9y ago
  Except this game isn't governed by just one body. It's a global economy, so even if your own country "strips your medals", you just move to the country that won't do that.

abandonliberty 9y ago

What you have is natural selection. Systemic corruption is itself a deterministic outcome/symptom when corruption is an adaptive trait. Unfortunately many undesirable behaviors are adaptive: the risk-adjusted rate of return is positive. 'Bad actors' have much more to gain from engaging in them than watchdogs have in stopping it. You will always lose the fight against corruption in the long run because as the war goes on you get weaker and they get stronger. This is a fundamental issue with organizational design (and democracy). Highly recommended further reading/viewing: Rules for rulers is very helpful at understanding this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Iron law of Oligarchy (the deterministic outcome of democracy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

alasdair_ 9y ago
From the Iron Law of Oligarchy page: "no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy" I'm not sure this is proven yet. Certainly in the past, I'd have agreed, but with communication via the Internet making realtime decision-making between all members of a democracy possible, I think direct democracy is theoretically possible at least. If not absolutely direct, then at least having the ability to instantly revoke a mandate from someone you have entrusted could go a low way to limiting the power of an oligarchy, as could entrusting different individuals and groups with a single person's vote, depending on the issue. For example, maybe I'd trust a particular economist to vote on my behalf for specific economic proposals, but I'd want Greenpeace to vote on my behalf for anything to do with, say, baby seal clubbing. So long as the individuals can instantly take back the voting power they have entrusted to someone else, a reasonable semblance of direct democracy could work. In practice, of course, it would be a hell of a mess to get everything functional, I just don't buy the notion that it's impossible in a world where everyone can communicate with everyone else essentially for free.
- dfee 9y ago
  Essentially for free is not “for free”. For example, the best way many people have to communicate with their peers is Facebook. But A) their peers aren’t the ones seeding the discussions, and B) their communication is filtered for signals like “vitality”. More mundane, but important ideas, are a bit squashed on a platform like that. Picking on Facebook because they’re the biggest, but Twitter appears to be worse on every axis, as it continues to evolve to favor clout.

bythckr 9y ago

"America is NOT corrupt. Every corrupt practice is being lobbied to be legalized. USA has legalized corruption." - a quip I heard somewhere.

irrational 9y ago

I agree with what you said, except for the "greed on scales we've never seen before". I think it's pretty clear, if you look back at the last 5,000 years of history that we've clearly seen greed on the same scale (or greater) than what we are seeing right now. It seems to be endemic to the human condition.

Animats 9y ago
The last time income concentration in the US looked like this was around 1900. That generated the union movement and interest in socialism and communism. (This time we got Trump. Oops.)
- mancerayder 9y ago
  A lot of people forget that fascism had an overtly anti-capitalist attitude, espoused in propaganda and racial imagery (take a look at what a factory boss looked like in Nazi propaganda and you'll understand what I'm trying to say). And a program, too, that of subservience to the State. However, I'm not saying it wasn't capitalistic in effect, or anything like that. Only that a system breakdown leads people to seek out extremes. In the late 19th and early 20th century there were ideologies in Europe and the U.S. that were available to cling on to, whether you were a union member, a soldier returned from a devastating war, or a deeply religious person, something was there to explain the order. Today we have Facebook news (60%, is it, of Americans get their news primarily from there?). We have programmatic advertising, a feedback loop of information being sent to our attention and our behaviors being tracked and sending back datapoints for further optimized tracking... I'm not sure what this says about the state of ideology and the tremendous disunity in western society compared to 100 years ago, in the sense of people coming together under the banner of coherent ideas... But it'd make an interesting thesis paper.
- irrational 9y ago
  That's nothing compared to the income concentration in Old Kingdom Egypt. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

nikolay 9y ago

I see more competition possible in some much more corrupt countries, so, maybe that's not exactly the root cause.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

The bigger problem is we're naive and/or completely unwilling to admit we have a corruption problem. US exceptionalism kinda dictates that corruption is a problem other (lesser) countries have. But certainly not here.