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You’re going to have to try harder than this. Money is a form of power, it is not equivalent to power. Amazon is valued at $1.6T and this is a calculation tha

by SllX 6y ago

You’re going to have to try harder than this. Money is a form of power, it is not equivalent to power. Amazon is valued at $1.6T and this is a calculation that directly correlates to how much individual shares of Amazon. Shares can be sold for money, but this decreases the share of power the shareholder has by the exact amount of shares they sold to the buyer, which increases their shares and power over the company. The act of buying and selling shares affects the stock price which can increase or decrease the market valuation of Amazon. If Amazon were a lone behemoth sitting on top of the stock market and second place wasn’t even close, I think you would have a stronger case. Checking literally thirty seconds ago, Amazon isn’t sitting up there all by its lonesome, it is the bronze medal with Apple and Microsoft sitting above it, Apple up above the $2T barrier, and Google lagging pretty closely behind at 1.3T. Now these market valuations will be a bit different tomorrow, or next week, or next month, but none of this is literal money in the bank. Money in the bank comes from the products and services these companies sell. They are also both cooperators and competitors with each other and companies like Facebook ($761B), Walmart ($395B I think it was) and Adobe ($232B). The power they can leverage from these assets is immense, but it is in competition with other motivated actors who are throwing more actual cash around. If we do nothing, it is likely there will be more trillion dollar companies this decade than the ones we are discussing now, some of those will be in different market sectors altogether, and some of those will be competitors, and some of those will be semi-competitors. Companies with far less cash than this already lobby for their interests in places like the Capitol, and the amount of money they’re using to successfully (and unsuccessfully) lobby is measured in the low millions, not the billions, and certainly not the trillions. So what exactly is the problem that reducing the size of these companies valuation and theoretical power supposed to solve? How does this benefit society? Is society being harmed by Amazon at $1.7T or Apple at $2.2B? Is the problem their size or their practices? Break this down. It’s easy to say “no company should be this size”, it’s a lot harder to say why, and I am not convinced yet. There’s plenty of people in the PRC with billions, and that hasn’t stopped the PRC from soliciting them for “voluntary” contributions, so maybe lots of money < lots of guns and a big Army in the overall economy of power.

burkaman 6y ago
I'm not trying to convince you, I just wanted to answer your question. I don't think it's possible to convince you in the space of one comment, and if it is, I'm not the one to do it. This is a centuries-old argument with absolutely no expert consensus that seems to get more difficult the more you study the issue. If you want an easy to read modern political argument you can read Break Em' Up by Zephyr Teachout. If you want a more academic approach I would look up the syllabus of an antitrust course and read some court cases, but different syllabi will probably give you wildly different conclusions. Supreme Court cases from a couple decades apart will give you different conclusions. As I said earlier, there is no right answer, it's about balancing inherently conflicting rights and deciding where to draw the line.
- SllX 6y ago
  > I'm not trying to convince you, I just wanted to answer your question. Sure it is, if there is a good convincing case, you can in the space of a single comment at least get me to seriously question and re-evaluate my priors, check out your book recommendations, and I would do the rest from there whether I ended up agreeing or disagreeing in the end. Let’s start with what is the impetus for action? Inaction is easy, it’s the default, but if my Representative (presently Pelosi) or US Senators or their eventual opponents and/or replacements trotted that line about how a company shouldn’t be able to get this big, out without an attempt at a good explanation as why we should cap the size of a corporation’s growth, I would throw them from the average politician column into the crazy column. Not just because they are taking that position, reasonable people can disagree, but because they would be seeking power on that position and they would be seeking an expansion of Federal power and action with that position without justification, without a limiting principle, frankly it looks arbitrary and capricious like an imaginary line that exists only in their mind that no company’s market valuation must ever cross without consequence. The political will to power that led to the anti-trust legislation, prosecution and conviction wasn’t that the defendants were merely too big for their britches; it was their abuse of a market dominant position that it was argued harmed the public. Even today reasonable people can disagree on whether this was a justifiable course of action on the part of the government, but I am not here to re-litigate historical events. Is the present position of Amazon and its close peers and the other >$100B companies as measured by their market valuations, not market share, not cash and other assets, but present market valuations, equivalent or like to the situations in the past where the government was willing and able to successfully pull the trigger of the antitrust gun? To reiterate, what is the impetus that we must act given the facts that we have about these contemporary corporations with such immensely high valuations?

by SllX 6y ago

burkaman 6y ago

I'm not trying to convince you, I just wanted to answer your question. I don't think it's possible to convince you in the space of one comment, and if it is, I'm not the one to do it. This is a centuries-old argument with absolutely no expert consensus that seems to get more difficult the more you study the issue. If you want an easy to read modern political argument you can read Break Em' Up by Zephyr Teachout. If you want a more academic approach I would look up the syllabus of an antitrust course and read some court cases, but different syllabi will probably give you wildly different conclusions. Supreme Court cases from a couple decades apart will give you different conclusions. As I said earlier, there is no right answer, it's about balancing inherently conflicting rights and deciding where to draw the line.

SllX 6y ago
> I'm not trying to convince you, I just wanted to answer your question. Sure it is, if there is a good convincing case, you can in the space of a single comment at least get me to seriously question and re-evaluate my priors, check out your book recommendations, and I would do the rest from there whether I ended up agreeing or disagreeing in the end. Let’s start with what is the impetus for action? Inaction is easy, it’s the default, but if my Representative (presently Pelosi) or US Senators or their eventual opponents and/or replacements trotted that line about how a company shouldn’t be able to get this big, out without an attempt at a good explanation as why we should cap the size of a corporation’s growth, I would throw them from the average politician column into the crazy column. Not just because they are taking that position, reasonable people can disagree, but because they would be seeking power on that position and they would be seeking an expansion of Federal power and action with that position without justification, without a limiting principle, frankly it looks arbitrary and capricious like an imaginary line that exists only in their mind that no company’s market valuation must ever cross without consequence. The political will to power that led to the anti-trust legislation, prosecution and conviction wasn’t that the defendants were merely too big for their britches; it was their abuse of a market dominant position that it was argued harmed the public. Even today reasonable people can disagree on whether this was a justifiable course of action on the part of the government, but I am not here to re-litigate historical events. Is the present position of Amazon and its close peers and the other >$100B companies as measured by their market valuations, not market share, not cash and other assets, but present market valuations, equivalent or like to the situations in the past where the government was willing and able to successfully pull the trigger of the antitrust gun? To reiterate, what is the impetus that we must act given the facts that we have about these contemporary corporations with such immensely high valuations?