4 ms·

Why do you think the workers have the upper hand? If anything, this letter sounds like workers have no recourse other than to find other employment. Based on h

Why do you think the workers have the upper hand? If anything, this letter sounds like workers have no recourse other than to find other employment. Based on historical trends, I suspect relying purely on the market mechanics will result in business failure, and then the policy action will be to save (bail out) the rail companies that are too big to fail. This will then lead to a bunch of strict controls so that bail outs never occur again, creating a regulatory moat further blocking future competition without significantly changing the corporate culture that led to the issue in the first place. Instead, an up-front regulatory limitation that prevents short term profiteering over long term sustainability seems required. How many trillionaires need to be minted on the backs of the population majority before significant regulatory limitations sound palatable? I guess I just don't understand the free market concept. It's like... sure it works great assuming you don't factor in the chaos components like greed, limitless ambition, explosive population growth, limited resources, natural disasters, international politics, etc etc etc etc etc.

ericmay 4y ago
> Why do you think the workers have the upper hand? If anything, this letter sounds like workers have no recourse other than to find other employment. Well yea. I'm not sure what the issue is there. Right now almost every company in America is struggling to attract workers and they're being forced to raise wages, increase benefits, move to 4-day work weeks, etc. Everyone is impatient. They want changes now but these things take time to evolve. It's much better for companies and people to organize democratically and organically - that's a fundamental principle for me, and then if those organizations in the long run are trending toward a negative outcome, that's when we need government to step in. Right now I see trends moving the right way, so I'm reluctant to support adding government intervention just to speed things up. It's a cost and inefficiency. I support government intervention and regulation, but it has to be used as a reluctant tool for great good. Environmental regulations, for example, are fantastic and I wholly support them. Mandatory 4-day work weeks when we are already trending in that direction doesn't seem like a good use of regulatory resources. > Based on historical trends, I suspect relying purely on the market mechanics will result in business failure, and then the policy action will be to save (bail out) the rail companies that are too big to fail. This will then lead to a bunch of strict controls so that bail outs never occur again, creating a regulatory moat further blocking future competition without significantly changing the corporate culture that led to the issue in the first place. The correct thing to do is not to implement policy action here and let the businesses fail. That's the missing piece. Too Big to Fail is a government failure, not a market failure. > How many trillionaires need to be minted on the backs of the population majority before significant regulatory limitations sound palatable? I guess I just don't understand the free market concept. It's like... sure it works great assuming you don't factor in the chaos components like greed, limitless ambition, explosive population growth, limited resources, natural disasters, international politics, etc etc etc etc etc. I really, really can't stand this type of mentality. It makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. Poor government in, say, America doesn't change the success of capitalism - ask Sweden and Denmark, for example. Both countries are staunch free-market capitalist economies. You're mistaking government failures for market failures. You should be asking why your government is not curbing excessive population growth, not Pepsi or Google.
- cheschire 4y ago
  I'm not trying to change your mind so hopefully this comes off as supportive and interesting. Issues can rarely be broken into a clean dichotomy of correct and incorrect. Math formulas have correct and incorrect answers, but socioeconomic issues lay on a foundation of unpredictable and unforeseeable chaos. No matter the control mechanism created, it cannot account for every variable. And I believe on that we agree. The divergence seems to be in what to do once that basis has been accepted. The regulated market approach seems to be to legislate and regulate to prevent the known worst-case scenarios. The free-market approach seems to be to accept that chaos is unpredictable and to build a support structure that empowers success. This whole paragraph is necessarily reductive, but hopefully it's respectfully so. But again, I don't claim to understand free market. Quite the opposite! I don't know how you could say there's a "correct" action to take when my understanding of the free market is to just let things play out. Clearly, I'm missing something. I also don't know how one could rightfully compare the socioeconomic situation of Sweden and Denmark to the USA without blatantly ignoring significant historical events that led to the current situation. Sweden is a variable pointing to an object in memory that has a wildly different behavior pattern than the object behind the USA pointer. Just because they implement many of the same interfaces does not mean that they implement all of the same interfaces. They also use vastly different amounts of system resources, and are used very differently by other objects.

ericmay 4y ago

> Why do you think the workers have the upper hand? If anything, this letter sounds like workers have no recourse other than to find other employment. Well yea. I'm not sure what the issue is there. Right now almost every company in America is struggling to attract workers and they're being forced to raise wages, increase benefits, move to 4-day work weeks, etc. Everyone is impatient. They want changes now but these things take time to evolve. It's much better for companies and people to organize democratically and organically - that's a fundamental principle for me, and then if those organizations in the long run are trending toward a negative outcome, that's when we need government to step in. Right now I see trends moving the right way, so I'm reluctant to support adding government intervention just to speed things up. It's a cost and inefficiency. I support government intervention and regulation, but it has to be used as a reluctant tool for great good. Environmental regulations, for example, are fantastic and I wholly support them. Mandatory 4-day work weeks when we are already trending in that direction doesn't seem like a good use of regulatory resources. > Based on historical trends, I suspect relying purely on the market mechanics will result in business failure, and then the policy action will be to save (bail out) the rail companies that are too big to fail. This will then lead to a bunch of strict controls so that bail outs never occur again, creating a regulatory moat further blocking future competition without significantly changing the corporate culture that led to the issue in the first place. The correct thing to do is not to implement policy action here and let the businesses fail. That's the missing piece. Too Big to Fail is a government failure, not a market failure. > How many trillionaires need to be minted on the backs of the population majority before significant regulatory limitations sound palatable? I guess I just don't understand the free market concept. It's like... sure it works great assuming you don't factor in the chaos components like greed, limitless ambition, explosive population growth, limited resources, natural disasters, international politics, etc etc etc etc etc. I really, really can't stand this type of mentality. It makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. Poor government in, say, America doesn't change the success of capitalism - ask Sweden and Denmark, for example. Both countries are staunch free-market capitalist economies. You're mistaking government failures for market failures. You should be asking why your government is not curbing excessive population growth, not Pepsi or Google.

cheschire 4y ago
I'm not trying to change your mind so hopefully this comes off as supportive and interesting. Issues can rarely be broken into a clean dichotomy of correct and incorrect. Math formulas have correct and incorrect answers, but socioeconomic issues lay on a foundation of unpredictable and unforeseeable chaos. No matter the control mechanism created, it cannot account for every variable. And I believe on that we agree. The divergence seems to be in what to do once that basis has been accepted. The regulated market approach seems to be to legislate and regulate to prevent the known worst-case scenarios. The free-market approach seems to be to accept that chaos is unpredictable and to build a support structure that empowers success. This whole paragraph is necessarily reductive, but hopefully it's respectfully so. But again, I don't claim to understand free market. Quite the opposite! I don't know how you could say there's a "correct" action to take when my understanding of the free market is to just let things play out. Clearly, I'm missing something. I also don't know how one could rightfully compare the socioeconomic situation of Sweden and Denmark to the USA without blatantly ignoring significant historical events that led to the current situation. Sweden is a variable pointing to an object in memory that has a wildly different behavior pattern than the object behind the USA pointer. Just because they implement many of the same interfaces does not mean that they implement all of the same interfaces. They also use vastly different amounts of system resources, and are used very differently by other objects.