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This behavior is being systematically reinforced more and more with every recession. Is there anyone outside of the mainstream of the two US parties who thinks

by cultus 7y ago

This behavior is being systematically reinforced more and more with every recession. Is there anyone outside of the mainstream of the two US parties who thinks that modern capitalism is desirable or sustainable?

mschuster91 7y ago
> This behavior is being systematically reinforced more and more with every recession. Not surprising, given that employment is going ever more and more centralized. What has been, for example, two dozen airlines is now concentrated to four airlines. Mom-and-pop food stores in every village? Mostly gone, replaced by huge supermarkets. Software/startups? Picked up by the megacorps. Regional phone/internet carriers? Same thing. Banks? Same thing, especially after the fire sale following 2008 where bigger banks bought off the skeletons of smaller collapsed ones. The ultimate advantage of modern capitalism is that it benefits from simple scaling to outright monopolic domination (where scale effects are fully exploitable). But on the other hand, this creates situations that are vulnerable to either exploitation of customers (e.g. when Uber has destroyed all local taxicabs, then it can jack up prices as it wants as they're the sole remaining provider and people need on demand transportation), exploitation of upstream vendors (e.g. Walmart with its scale can dictate vendors absolutely ridiculous terms) or to "too big to fail" status (most famous: banks, but just imagine Walmart going out of business, that would be 700k (!) people out of a job overnight plus MANY MANY MANY regions without a place to shop food). This is why originally there was anti-trust regulation established, but it fell out of use for a couple decades now. No company should be so big that it vanishing can threaten national security (Boeing!), or hundreds of thousands of lost jobs (Walmart, McDonalds, ...), or destitute entire regions overnight, or the national food supply.
- snarf21 7y ago
  Exactly. This is regulatory failure. The FTC has failed us. We've accepted it because of ever increasing retirement returns but this is the cost.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    An unfortunate side effect of a purely capital based pension system - additionally, with more and more investment capital coming from pension funds, it's going to be an interesting question how the funds managers govern the companies they've invested in - will they be "silent" participants that do not vote, or will they behave as activists? And what will happen in the latter case if the interests between the funds managers (demanding profits above e.g. environment protection or social/wage responsibility) run against the interest of the future pensioners investing in the funds?
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      Exactly which state pension funds are not evaporating at this moment?
      - mschuster91 7y ago
        Germany. Our pensions are on a rolling system - meaning that the current worker generation pays the pensions of the pension generation (plus a bit extra cash from taxes). Downside: you need a healthy young population for such a system to be sustainable, and a combination of various factors making it harder for young parents to start families (exploding rents linked with wage depression, job insecurity) and utter xenophobia means that it will have problems in the next 20-30 years if something isn't done now.
thinkmassive 7y ago
government bailouts are not capitalism
- LarryDarrell 7y ago
  True, but now you are in the No True Scotsman weeds. Government bailouts have been happening regularly for most of our lifetimes. We are incessantly told the US is a Capitalist country. So in the minds of the average citizen, either bailouts are part of the capitalist system, or the US has never been capitalist. We're going to see "Modern Capitalism" and "Late Stage Capitalism" thrown around with a lot more frequency as corporations exert their power and we struggle to define what we are seeing. If we had more consciousness and weren't so confused by 50 years of Cold War brain rot we would just call our age Late Stage Plutocracy or something.
- cultus 7y ago
  The thing is that this is inevitable with capitalism. Money will always end up influencing government power, leading to a plutocracy who make their money through anti-competitive rent-seeking behavior instead of innovation. That's precisely what's happened the world over, if you haven't noticed. The pure Platonic ideal of capitalism or even anything approximating it is impossible in practice. It has never happened, and it will never happen. It is just as utopian and pie-in-the-sky as "from each according to their ability, and to each according to their need."

by cultus 7y ago

mschuster91 7y ago

> This behavior is being systematically reinforced more and more with every recession. Not surprising, given that employment is going ever more and more centralized. What has been, for example, two dozen airlines is now concentrated to four airlines. Mom-and-pop food stores in every village? Mostly gone, replaced by huge supermarkets. Software/startups? Picked up by the megacorps. Regional phone/internet carriers? Same thing. Banks? Same thing, especially after the fire sale following 2008 where bigger banks bought off the skeletons of smaller collapsed ones. The ultimate advantage of modern capitalism is that it benefits from simple scaling to outright monopolic domination (where scale effects are fully exploitable). But on the other hand, this creates situations that are vulnerable to either exploitation of customers (e.g. when Uber has destroyed all local taxicabs, then it can jack up prices as it wants as they're the sole remaining provider and people need on demand transportation), exploitation of upstream vendors (e.g. Walmart with its scale can dictate vendors absolutely ridiculous terms) or to "too big to fail" status (most famous: banks, but just imagine Walmart going out of business, that would be 700k (!) people out of a job overnight plus MANY MANY MANY regions without a place to shop food). This is why originally there was anti-trust regulation established, but it fell out of use for a couple decades now. No company should be so big that it vanishing can threaten national security (Boeing!), or hundreds of thousands of lost jobs (Walmart, McDonalds, ...), or destitute entire regions overnight, or the national food supply.

snarf21 7y ago
Exactly. This is regulatory failure. The FTC has failed us. We've accepted it because of ever increasing retirement returns but this is the cost.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  An unfortunate side effect of a purely capital based pension system - additionally, with more and more investment capital coming from pension funds, it's going to be an interesting question how the funds managers govern the companies they've invested in - will they be "silent" participants that do not vote, or will they behave as activists? And what will happen in the latter case if the interests between the funds managers (demanding profits above e.g. environment protection or social/wage responsibility) run against the interest of the future pensioners investing in the funds?
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    Exactly which state pension funds are not evaporating at this moment?
    - mschuster91 7y ago
      Germany. Our pensions are on a rolling system - meaning that the current worker generation pays the pensions of the pension generation (plus a bit extra cash from taxes). Downside: you need a healthy young population for such a system to be sustainable, and a combination of various factors making it harder for young parents to start families (exploding rents linked with wage depression, job insecurity) and utter xenophobia means that it will have problems in the next 20-30 years if something isn't done now.

thinkmassive 7y ago

government bailouts are not capitalism

LarryDarrell 7y ago
True, but now you are in the No True Scotsman weeds. Government bailouts have been happening regularly for most of our lifetimes. We are incessantly told the US is a Capitalist country. So in the minds of the average citizen, either bailouts are part of the capitalist system, or the US has never been capitalist. We're going to see "Modern Capitalism" and "Late Stage Capitalism" thrown around with a lot more frequency as corporations exert their power and we struggle to define what we are seeing. If we had more consciousness and weren't so confused by 50 years of Cold War brain rot we would just call our age Late Stage Plutocracy or something.
cultus 7y ago
The thing is that this is inevitable with capitalism. Money will always end up influencing government power, leading to a plutocracy who make their money through anti-competitive rent-seeking behavior instead of innovation. That's precisely what's happened the world over, if you haven't noticed. The pure Platonic ideal of capitalism or even anything approximating it is impossible in practice. It has never happened, and it will never happen. It is just as utopian and pie-in-the-sky as "from each according to their ability, and to each according to their need."