6 ms·

Nearly every law in the US is a weaponized corporate action to prevent competition and secure market hold. That already happened. That is the root cause of th

by edoo 7y ago

Nearly every law in the US is a weaponized corporate action to prevent competition and secure market hold. That already happened. That is the root cause of the wealth disparity. You argue for more of the same. The government will not be able to fix problems it created. It will only make them worse.

CyanBird 7y ago
This Friedman-like thinking and cute propaganda sound bytes just doesn't work tho Chile during the Pinochet Regime is an excellent example of the Neoliberal system not delivering on the promises, as hn_throwaway_99 mentioned, economies of scale simply take over any benefit of low gov friction "free markets", and any small advantage over time becomes an overwhelming one. At which point it simply becomes a mathematical snowball effect, reducing or removing government barriers of entry won't make your particular gadget or doodad be able to compete in quality nor cost against one produced by a huge mega-conglomerate, if anything that mega-conglomerate will see if it can steal your idea or buy the patent (gov!) so it can improve its own. It is the same thing that happens in South Korea with the Chaebols Anyhow, point being, the Kansas Experiment failed[1], Chilean Chicago Boys Experiment failed to deliver after ~17 years of authoritarian rule(When Pinochet left power country had a ~40% poverty rate)[2] This leads to the simple idea that the less friction your system has to accrue wealth the higher wealth inequality will be, and then the goal should be to make it as easy as possible for everybody to make their own start ups, but to create as much friction as possible for said startups to gain too much economy of scale momentum. Where the threshold of where that line would be, be left to policy makers, and ideally something politically independent, akin to the central bank [1] https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-tax-cuts-kansas-deals-with-aftermath-of-experiment https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-t... [2] https://imgur.com/BpwMlBy https://imgur.com/BpwMlBy Pg17 United Nations Document https://www.undp.org/content/dam/chile/docs/pobreza/undp_cl_pobreza_cap_7_desiguypob.pdf https://www.undp.org/content/dam/chile/docs/pobreza/undp_cl_...
- edoo 7y ago
  In a just society the only possible way to get rich is through helping people. We want rich people. The more rich people the better off everyone is. Capitalism is beautiful. If a company is able to sustain market share through healthy competition then wonderful, that is great. Every law in the US right now is to ensure those corporations don't lose market share, edging everyone else out. It is basic economics. It is the government intervention that insures competition is reduced every single time, literally, not figuratively.
  - tinsx 7y ago
    The issue with the current set of laws regulating corporations is that those laws were made with intervention from lobbyist groups, which changed legislation to benefit those lobbying groups. In reality, the way to do this fairly is to repeal these laws, remove power from corporations giving it back to the state (possibly through actually taxing corporations and the rich properly, along the lines of what Huey Long proposed a long time ago) and removing the capacity for corporations to lobby at all. The problem is not regulation, it is that corporations have the power to change that regulation. An unregulated market would be just as unfair as regulation enforced monopolies and monosonies. If such changes were brought about, the increased taxes could go towards things like infrastructure and social welfare, which would actually help people, unlike what billionaires pretend is fair compensation to their harms upon society, when in reality they give back very little. Bezos and Musk for example, both got into the space industry instead of putting a lot of their wealth back into philanthropy. The seeming odd one out is those who are like Bill Gates, who do actually give back a massive portion of their wealth.
    - edoo 7y ago
      The regulation is what allows the problems by design. Take Wall Street, most the big names would have been shut down and liquidated to cover crime restitution... if it weren't for regulation. The EPA regulations shield companies from liability if they have an accident but were following the regulations they lobbied for. I worked for a megacorp that passed safety laws to hurt competitors. The airport TSA regs are specifically for shielding the airlines from liability in the case of a security incident. All regulations are a fraud. Every problem they purport to solve would already be covered by existing law, serious law. Either you are liable for damages or you are not. With any regulations the big players never are. Pollution is already covered through property and violence laws (poisoning my air is a violent act). Removing the regulations is what would remove power from the corporations. If it is already covered under existing law then the regs are to bypass them.
- squirrelicus 7y ago
  But... Like... Economies of scale are literally what gave the capitalist West it's unthinkably high standard of living.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Can't tell if sarcasm or not, but the US doesn't have some "unthinkably high standard of living". It's actually below most western European countries in most global metrics, including such basics as infant mortality. It trumps most in gun deaths and incarceration rates though, so there's that... E.g. http://premieroffshore.com/usa-is-best-country-in-the-world/ http://premieroffshore.com/usa-is-best-country-in-the-world/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924190303.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924190303.h... https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student... And those countries have much less megacorps and "economies of scale"....
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists - American or not. It's salient not because it disproves your judgment (and that of many others) that the US is a dysfunctional hellhole, but because it is what people are compelled to rationalize away and obviously don't succeed on their own terms. [1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=EU-US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
      - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        EU includes some poor countries that were recently under Soviet occupation. And before that WW2 levelled entire cities, like capital of Poland was obliterated as it was bombed once when Germans took it, once when the Polish rose up, then again as Soviets took it. At the dawn of computer era there was a wall, landmines and machine gun nests going though the centre of Berlin. Isolate your comparison to northern Europe, spared by war and Soviets, and the difference in GDP is no longer in US favour.
coldtea 7y ago
It's not the government that created the problem, it's the big corporations, getting too powerful, and buying laws to stifle competition and enjoy market hold. What I proposed is the opposite: laws working against those mega-corporations in favor of many smaller corporations. Only the people, through law, have the power to do that. The big corporate overlords, left to their own devices, wont be able to fix the problems they created. They will only make them worse.
- Ar-Curunir 7y ago
  I agree with most of your comment, but I disagree that law is the only avenue. One can imagine other structures like co-ops.

by edoo 7y ago

CyanBird 7y ago

This Friedman-like thinking and cute propaganda sound bytes just doesn't work tho Chile during the Pinochet Regime is an excellent example of the Neoliberal system not delivering on the promises, as hn_throwaway_99 mentioned, economies of scale simply take over any benefit of low gov friction "free markets", and any small advantage over time becomes an overwhelming one. At which point it simply becomes a mathematical snowball effect, reducing or removing government barriers of entry won't make your particular gadget or doodad be able to compete in quality nor cost against one produced by a huge mega-conglomerate, if anything that mega-conglomerate will see if it can steal your idea or buy the patent (gov!) so it can improve its own. It is the same thing that happens in South Korea with the Chaebols Anyhow, point being, the Kansas Experiment failed[1], Chilean Chicago Boys Experiment failed to deliver after ~17 years of authoritarian rule(When Pinochet left power country had a ~40% poverty rate)[2] This leads to the simple idea that the less friction your system has to accrue wealth the higher wealth inequality will be, and then the goal should be to make it as easy as possible for everybody to make their own start ups, but to create as much friction as possible for said startups to gain too much economy of scale momentum. Where the threshold of where that line would be, be left to policy makers, and ideally something politically independent, akin to the central bank [1] https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-tax-cuts-kansas-deals-with-aftermath-of-experiment https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-t... [2] https://imgur.com/BpwMlBy https://imgur.com/BpwMlBy Pg17 United Nations Document https://www.undp.org/content/dam/chile/docs/pobreza/undp_cl_pobreza_cap_7_desiguypob.pdf https://www.undp.org/content/dam/chile/docs/pobreza/undp_cl_...

edoo 7y ago
In a just society the only possible way to get rich is through helping people. We want rich people. The more rich people the better off everyone is. Capitalism is beautiful. If a company is able to sustain market share through healthy competition then wonderful, that is great. Every law in the US right now is to ensure those corporations don't lose market share, edging everyone else out. It is basic economics. It is the government intervention that insures competition is reduced every single time, literally, not figuratively.
- tinsx 7y ago
  The issue with the current set of laws regulating corporations is that those laws were made with intervention from lobbyist groups, which changed legislation to benefit those lobbying groups. In reality, the way to do this fairly is to repeal these laws, remove power from corporations giving it back to the state (possibly through actually taxing corporations and the rich properly, along the lines of what Huey Long proposed a long time ago) and removing the capacity for corporations to lobby at all. The problem is not regulation, it is that corporations have the power to change that regulation. An unregulated market would be just as unfair as regulation enforced monopolies and monosonies. If such changes were brought about, the increased taxes could go towards things like infrastructure and social welfare, which would actually help people, unlike what billionaires pretend is fair compensation to their harms upon society, when in reality they give back very little. Bezos and Musk for example, both got into the space industry instead of putting a lot of their wealth back into philanthropy. The seeming odd one out is those who are like Bill Gates, who do actually give back a massive portion of their wealth.
  - edoo 7y ago
    The regulation is what allows the problems by design. Take Wall Street, most the big names would have been shut down and liquidated to cover crime restitution... if it weren't for regulation. The EPA regulations shield companies from liability if they have an accident but were following the regulations they lobbied for. I worked for a megacorp that passed safety laws to hurt competitors. The airport TSA regs are specifically for shielding the airlines from liability in the case of a security incident. All regulations are a fraud. Every problem they purport to solve would already be covered by existing law, serious law. Either you are liable for damages or you are not. With any regulations the big players never are. Pollution is already covered through property and violence laws (poisoning my air is a violent act). Removing the regulations is what would remove power from the corporations. If it is already covered under existing law then the regs are to bypass them.
squirrelicus 7y ago
But... Like... Economies of scale are literally what gave the capitalist West it's unthinkably high standard of living.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Can't tell if sarcasm or not, but the US doesn't have some "unthinkably high standard of living". It's actually below most western European countries in most global metrics, including such basics as infant mortality. It trumps most in gun deaths and incarceration rates though, so there's that... E.g. http://premieroffshore.com/usa-is-best-country-in-the-world/ http://premieroffshore.com/usa-is-best-country-in-the-world/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924190303.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924190303.h... https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student... And those countries have much less megacorps and "economies of scale"....
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists - American or not. It's salient not because it disproves your judgment (and that of many others) that the US is a dysfunctional hellhole, but because it is what people are compelled to rationalize away and obviously don't succeed on their own terms. [1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=EU-US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      EU includes some poor countries that were recently under Soviet occupation. And before that WW2 levelled entire cities, like capital of Poland was obliterated as it was bombed once when Germans took it, once when the Polish rose up, then again as Soviets took it. At the dawn of computer era there was a wall, landmines and machine gun nests going though the centre of Berlin. Isolate your comparison to northern Europe, spared by war and Soviets, and the difference in GDP is no longer in US favour.

coldtea 7y ago

It's not the government that created the problem, it's the big corporations, getting too powerful, and buying laws to stifle competition and enjoy market hold. What I proposed is the opposite: laws working against those mega-corporations in favor of many smaller corporations. Only the people, through law, have the power to do that. The big corporate overlords, left to their own devices, wont be able to fix the problems they created. They will only make them worse.

Ar-Curunir 7y ago
I agree with most of your comment, but I disagree that law is the only avenue. One can imagine other structures like co-ops.