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We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.
by automatic6131 11mo ago
We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.
- epistasis 11mo agoThis was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs. Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it. Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self, and greater returns to the rest of society.
- sharts 11mo agoa better approach might be to farming out shares to stakeholders. that seems a lot more dynamic and self-correcting than periodic taxation battles after the fact
- CamperBob2 11mo agoKhan was largely ineffectual. The current administration, if it can be blamed on SV at all, is more likely to be the result of Harris's insanely ill-timed proposal to tax unrealized capital gains just as election season was kicking into high gear.
- adgjlsfhk1 11mo agoIMO Khan was by far the best we've had in at least 2 decades. Her FCC even got a judge to rule to break up Google! The biggest downside Khan had was being attached to a 1 term president. There's just not that many court cases against trillion dollar companies you can take from investigation to winning the appeal on in 4 years
- CamperBob2 11mo agoAll true, and I'm not making a value statement about whether her influence was good or bad. However, Khan only threatened the oligarchs' companies, while Harris point-blank threatened their fortunes. Don't pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel and bandwidth by the exabyte-second. Or at least, don't do it a month before an election.
- jordanb 11mo agoThe oligarchs hated Kahn with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. If you listened to All In all they were doing is ranting about her and Gary Gensler. That being said, Kamala's refusal to run on Kahn's record definitely helped cost her the election. She thought she could play footsie with Wall Street and SV by backchanneling that she would fire Kahn, so she felt like she couldn't say anything good about Kahn without upsetting the oligarchs, but what she was doing was really popular.
- aerhardt 11mo agoShe was largely ineffectual because she was cock-blocked by the ruling classes. I lean libertarian-capitalist and still I think this. Although it's not a settled debate in the classic liberal or libertarian traditions, there are plenty of arguments in them against the excessive concentration of power.
- vlovich123 11mo agoSorry, how did she stand in the way of IPOs? She was against the larger players providing easy off-ramps to smaller players but I don’t recall anything about IPOs. Indeed, Figma’s IPO is precisely because she undid the pending Adobe / Figma merger if I recall correctly.
- epistasis 11mo agoYou're right, IPOs were not blocked by this. I wish I could still edit to add a correction!
- fpoling 11mo agoI think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.
- logancbrown 11mo agoAh yes, the same tax mentality that is working great for EU innovation.
- wqaatwt 11mo agoCorporate taxes specifically were quite high by European standards until 2027 and are not relatively that low today either
- Terr_ 11mo agoIs that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have big compensation "expenses" for executives. The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.
- octoberfranklin 11mo agoThe sane version of this proposal omits the "exponential" part, applies to profits (net income), and makes the tax rate industry-specific (just like Washington State's revenue tax).
- Hikikomori 11mo agoSet limits so the top cant earn more than x times the lowest paid in the company then.
- steve_b 11mo agoCompanies would then outsource their low-paying jobs to other companies.
- Aloisius 11mo agoSamsung lost a large percentage of market share to their competitors in the last couple years, so I'm pretty sure they already have to participate in markets. Well, assuming they haven't revived the cartel.
- Melatonic 11mo agoYea when I think of DRAM I think of SK Hynix and Micron with Samsung far behind.