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This is a familiar tune. Take a heavily regulated market with massive government intervention, watch it get tied in knots, and then declare that the "free mark

by mhartl 18y ago

This is a familiar tune. Take a heavily regulated market with massive government intervention, watch it get tied in knots, and then declare that the "free market" has failed. The most dramatic historical example is perhaps the U.S. economy leading up to the Great Depression, but we've seen plenty others in recent years: the "deregulated" energy markets in California, "free market" healthcare, and now the subprime meltdown. I'm beginning to suspect people will never learn.

jmtame 18y ago
The US is going to need to go through a complete meltdown. A Great Depression probably wouldn't make people angry and organized enough to cause the change that we need. My prediction is that the United States won't stick around for too long (if you take a history textbook perspective on this, which you can see other failed societies have made the same mistakes that we are now repeating). I think we have a fighting chance to create the desirable society that eliminates corporatocracy. Did you know the planet contains 13,000 zettajoules of geothermal energy? The entire world uses 0.5 zettajoules of energy per year. And we can harvest this, but there are patent wars to suppress this from easily happening. Let's look at the other resources available, which cost us nothing at all. Wind? 3 states of wind energy can power the entire United States. Water? The UK alone could be powered by water/tide energy alone. Solar? One hour of thermal energy in the day could power the United States for an entire year if we harvested it properly. Travel by plane? Who does that when you could travel by AT3's mag-lev trains, which can reach speeds up to 4,000 MPH with zero moving parts and zero emissions. Oh, and it uses about 10% of the energy of an airplane. Yes, they work in land and water. What happens when technology replaces humans? You no longer need to work. In our capitalistic society, it's called unemployment. If you look into the Venus Project, it's called you get bored and start thinking about space exploration. Once people figure out that we don't really need these corporations, we'll never have this type of problem come up again. The corporations are holding us back and creating scarcity (real or perceived) at every opportunity. Like I said, I don't think the United States is going to get it right, we're in far too deep over our heads. And the attitudes and apathy of the American people never ceases to amaze me (in a bad way) as an undergraduate.
- lacker 18y ago
  It's not like if you outlaw corporations, suddenly a new form of organization will appear where nobody is greedy any more. It's not like "the corporations" are sitting on the secret to infinite wind energy and they're just afraid of change. Corporations are made up of people. They are not perfect because people are not perfect and organizing large groups of people is hard. Outlawing corporations will not solve either of those problems.
  - unalone 18y ago
    Yeah. And you can't exactly say that corporations never do good, either. Because an overwhelming amount of the time, they do. Even when they do bad things, they often do it at the whim of the public. (To pick a lesser example: remember that the people really DO like sensationalist news and cheesy, humorless sitcoms.) Blaming corporations does nothing. Trying to FIX corporations, yes. Trying to REMOVE them is ignorant and short-sighted.
    - JulianMorrison 18y ago
      A broadcast medium, or a mass producer, makes more money making something a lot of people like a little, than something which polarizes customers into love and apathy. From this springs every horror and alienation in the 20th century pop culture. Upside: it's a passing technological phase, and we're nearly all the way through.
      - unalone 18y ago
        I wish it was a passing phase. But people love it everywhere. I saw it two years ago on Reddit, and have since seen it flame up into a ridiculous deluge of fringe theories and an absolute death of everything interesting. People like everything but fair and detailed reporting. News reflects this. Same with culture. People like buying vast amounts of worthless things. It doesn't matter what field it's in. Geeks collect as much as rifle hunters, they just collect different things. That's led to an industry that specializes in creating excess.
stupiduser 18y ago
It cuts both ways. Take a heavily state-controlled market like the entire US system during and after WWII and claim the gains are due to the free market.
- mhartl 18y ago
  It's true that we should be wary of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. In this case, I think the right lesson is that markets are so robust that they can tolerate a lot of abuse before buckling. For example, to bolster agricultural prices during the New Deal, the federal government paid farmers not only to stop growing crops, but to plow perfectly good crops under. Frédéric Bastiat himself (of broken window and candlemaker petition fame) couldn't come up with a better reductio ad absurdum, and yet it was implemented as real policy in a time of mass hunger. Nevertheless, America, and the world, survived and prospered. Recall also that even the Soviet Union, with an economic system about as bad as you can imagine, still lasted ~70 years.

by mhartl 18y ago

jmtame 18y ago

The US is going to need to go through a complete meltdown. A Great Depression probably wouldn't make people angry and organized enough to cause the change that we need. My prediction is that the United States won't stick around for too long (if you take a history textbook perspective on this, which you can see other failed societies have made the same mistakes that we are now repeating). I think we have a fighting chance to create the desirable society that eliminates corporatocracy. Did you know the planet contains 13,000 zettajoules of geothermal energy? The entire world uses 0.5 zettajoules of energy per year. And we can harvest this, but there are patent wars to suppress this from easily happening. Let's look at the other resources available, which cost us nothing at all. Wind? 3 states of wind energy can power the entire United States. Water? The UK alone could be powered by water/tide energy alone. Solar? One hour of thermal energy in the day could power the United States for an entire year if we harvested it properly. Travel by plane? Who does that when you could travel by AT3's mag-lev trains, which can reach speeds up to 4,000 MPH with zero moving parts and zero emissions. Oh, and it uses about 10% of the energy of an airplane. Yes, they work in land and water. What happens when technology replaces humans? You no longer need to work. In our capitalistic society, it's called unemployment. If you look into the Venus Project, it's called you get bored and start thinking about space exploration. Once people figure out that we don't really need these corporations, we'll never have this type of problem come up again. The corporations are holding us back and creating scarcity (real or perceived) at every opportunity. Like I said, I don't think the United States is going to get it right, we're in far too deep over our heads. And the attitudes and apathy of the American people never ceases to amaze me (in a bad way) as an undergraduate.

lacker 18y ago
It's not like if you outlaw corporations, suddenly a new form of organization will appear where nobody is greedy any more. It's not like "the corporations" are sitting on the secret to infinite wind energy and they're just afraid of change. Corporations are made up of people. They are not perfect because people are not perfect and organizing large groups of people is hard. Outlawing corporations will not solve either of those problems.
- unalone 18y ago
  Yeah. And you can't exactly say that corporations never do good, either. Because an overwhelming amount of the time, they do. Even when they do bad things, they often do it at the whim of the public. (To pick a lesser example: remember that the people really DO like sensationalist news and cheesy, humorless sitcoms.) Blaming corporations does nothing. Trying to FIX corporations, yes. Trying to REMOVE them is ignorant and short-sighted.
  - JulianMorrison 18y ago
    A broadcast medium, or a mass producer, makes more money making something a lot of people like a little, than something which polarizes customers into love and apathy. From this springs every horror and alienation in the 20th century pop culture. Upside: it's a passing technological phase, and we're nearly all the way through.
    - unalone 18y ago
      I wish it was a passing phase. But people love it everywhere. I saw it two years ago on Reddit, and have since seen it flame up into a ridiculous deluge of fringe theories and an absolute death of everything interesting. People like everything but fair and detailed reporting. News reflects this. Same with culture. People like buying vast amounts of worthless things. It doesn't matter what field it's in. Geeks collect as much as rifle hunters, they just collect different things. That's led to an industry that specializes in creating excess.

stupiduser 18y ago

It cuts both ways. Take a heavily state-controlled market like the entire US system during and after WWII and claim the gains are due to the free market.

mhartl 18y ago
It's true that we should be wary of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. In this case, I think the right lesson is that markets are so robust that they can tolerate a lot of abuse before buckling. For example, to bolster agricultural prices during the New Deal, the federal government paid farmers not only to stop growing crops, but to plow perfectly good crops under. Frédéric Bastiat himself (of broken window and candlemaker petition fame) couldn't come up with a better reductio ad absurdum, and yet it was implemented as real policy in a time of mass hunger. Nevertheless, America, and the world, survived and prospered. Recall also that even the Soviet Union, with an economic system about as bad as you can imagine, still lasted ~70 years.