8 ms·

Very good speech and an important national dialog to spark. I'd like to call attention to one thing though: "I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as

by abalone 13y ago

Very good speech and an important national dialog to spark. I'd like to call attention to one thing though: "I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth." This demonstrates a basic confusion that we Americans have about ourselves, even most "lefties" and "libertarians": The false belief that we live in a free market economy. The truth is, the state plays a massive role in our economy. This is especially true for us Silicon Valley entrepreneurial Americans. Because the government's hand is especially strong in high tech. The Internet. Microcomputers. Lasers. Jets. Robots. Siri. You name a major high-tech innovation, and it's probably got DARPA or NASA behind it in the earliest, highest-risk, most capital-intensive stages. Look again and you'll probably find lots more government support in bringing the technology to market through procurement. This is all the more damning for our system's poverty. The rich and powerful are fully in favor of a strong, powerful state-run economy that serves their needs. That's why it's done under the rubric of military spending -- "we have to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on this because we have to defend ourselves" sounds better than "because we need it to produce the Silicon Valley economic miracle." Because the latter would suggest it's fair to direct major taxpayer support for other economic investments like education, health care and housing. Instead, the state-supported rich and powerful can claim we live in a "free market economy" that just happens to have trillions of state-sponsored investment, for them.

jerf 13y ago
The 2012 US GDP was 15.68 trillion. The 2012 Federal government expenditures were 3.54 trillion. Right off the top, the Federal government accounts for 22.6% of the economic activity in the country. Depending on how you measure, you can quibble with this exact choice of numbers, but no matter how you fiddle you're not getting out of the Federal government being a huge part of the economy directly. State and local governments still not counted in that number. The Federal government also controls the Federal interest rate and its centralized currency directly. It extensively regulates every major financial industry; to the extent that this fails to produce sufficient "regulation" for a liberal's purposes, it is, generally speaking, not for lack of statutory power, and a concerned liberal should probably be looking at the (almost always) liberals exercising the statutory power, rather than complaining about the few people whose meager voices suggest that perhaps the power shouldn't exist at all, lost in the sea of those screaming for more. Indeed, it extensively regulates every major industry. It produces thousands of pages of new regulations every year. It taxes nearly every economic transaction. You can't hardly do anything without the government being involved. It already engages in huge wealth transfers every which way (even some really crazy stupid ones, like Obamacare's transfers from the young and healthy to the on-average wealthier older crowd). This is not necessarily and automatically a bad thing. I'm just mentioning this stuff to show that the idea that we live in some sort of libertarian nightmare is ludicrous nonsense. The state has the power already, today. It's not theoretical, it's a done deal. If you don't like the outcome we're experiencing, take it up with the State. Personally I can't help but observe that we keep giving more power to fewer people under the rubric of "better government", and, lo and behold, our society has ever more power and wealth concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. Why, oh why ever could it be? Somehow some people manage to convince themselves this is all the libertarian's fault. I'd suggest looking at the people who keep putting more and more power in fewer and fewer people's hands and then acting all confused about the outcome where more power ends up in fewer people's hands. There might be a connection there. We might want to consider, you know, not doing that more if we don't like the outcome we're getting. Much of the reason why I am a libertarian is that I actually think it's a good thing for society, in precisely the ways that David Simon is complaining about. With the bloated Federal government taking all the power, the government not only doesn't solve "the problem", for whatever problem we're talking about, but it also often prevents you from solving the problem. It can do this either legally, where it claims for itself exclusively the power to solve the problem, followed by it either doing nothing or doing the wrong thing, or perhaps more poisonously, it convinces you that it is its responsibility to solve the problem, followed again by not doing so or doing the wrong thing. A couple of days ago I happened to flip by the Canadian Broadcasting Channel's news hour, and there was this guy standing in front of a children's playground, complaining that the city wasn't taking care of it. Scattered on the playground were about 30-40 bagged piles of doggy-doo-doo. It otherwise appeared to be a fine playground; it was modern, the paint was cared for, the swings were all there, it did not show obvious wear. He's standing there talking to the reporter and complaining that their part of the city needs more money. My crazy, socially-evil, society-hating, collective-despising libertarian anwser was "Dude, in the amount of time you spent complaining to the reporter, you could have just cleaned up the playground." Seriously, all that was wrong with it appeared to be scattered piles of, and again I emphasize, bagged doggie-doo. This is how the government can corrode away the very social consciousness that people so desparately try to use governments to create. Yeah, it's a small example, but it happens everywhere, for all kinds of things. (Yes, I realize that cleaning it would then mean the guy couldn't complain, so he's putting on a show. I further realize that it's really quite likely that the doggie-doo receptable probably had all the doggie doo piled up in an somewhat unsanitary pile, and the guy probably deliberately scattered it before the video shoot, because really, scattered bagged doggie poo is a rather unlikely scenario. However, I'd suggest this just further emphasizes the point I was trying to make here. You can't create "social responsibility" by telling everyone that somebody in $GOVERNMENT is going to take care of "it". You create the exact opposite. If you want more social responsibility you need less government.)
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  It's an often repeated libertarian mantra that the 22.6% of the US economy under state control is responsible for ~100% of the inequity. Unfortunately, the network effect ensures that a "government node" in the economic graph is always nearby, and the coplexity inherent in the system makes it easy to form a plausible argument assigning blame to any node within distance 2 or 3 of a problem, making the mantra non-falsifiable. It deserves mention that this game can be played in reverse just as easily. The only way that I know to introduce an ounce of objectivity into the discussion is to pick a single topic and dive so deeply into it that you are no longer fooled by the false but plausible statements hurled around by either side. Unfortunately, this is a very difficult task. I don't know how to scale the approach.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    22.6% of the US economy under state control is responsible for ~100% of the inequity. Inflation has a compounding effect of screwing the poor and transferring that wealth to the rich. It shouldn't be surprising that in 1970 Nixon unpegged the dollar and let inflation float and since 1973 the income inequality in this country has gradually become unhinged. we keep giving more power to fewer people under the rubric of "better government", and, lo and behold, our society has ever more power and wealth concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. Why, oh why ever could it be. Rich and wealthy liberal economists keep prescribing more government(which they may or may not realize contributed to their cupidity) to 'help out the poor' with 'stimulus' (which gets subcontracted to politically connected, wealthy people - did we not just throw 650 millon dollars at already-rich people to build a broken healthcare website?), while stabbing them in the back with inflation
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - hbags 13y ago
      Inflation is most damaging to those who save but do not invest. The poor are near 100% consumption, so it has essentially no effect on them. A person whose average cash balance is $100 is not vulnerable to inflation.
seoguru 13y ago
Very well put. Mariana Mazzucato talks about this idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1IPsldbBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1IPsldbBg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPvG_fGPvQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPvG_fGPvQo
- dnautics 13y ago
  that is a crazy video. You can either take her thesis at her word, or you can read between the lines and realize that this is an incredible outline of how government transfers wealth to the already wealthy. Her suggestion is that the reason why the US is such a dynamic economic system is because the government underwrites it; but this is a flawed concept. In the era 1860-1920 the US government did not underwrite very much scientific or technology or provide SBIRs or any such thing, and you would be hard pressed to argue that the US did not undergo major economic improvement.
  - mooreds 13y ago
    Re 1860-1920, have you heard of the railroad land grants? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts These were tremendous gifts to private companies to induce investment in what was one of the high tech industries of the time.
    - dnautics 13y ago
      true. However, there were fabulously successful railroads (e.g. great northern) which were entirely privately funded, even down to securing property easements (which these days would be done using eminent domain). IIRC the great northern was really one of the few railway that didn't suffer a downturn and shutter itself during that era... It's now a part of BNSF.
      - scarmig 13y ago
        It seems remiss to talk about how the Great Northern didn't need any government help when it bought all its land from the federal government after the federal government had acquired control of it by slaughtering most of the land's previous residents.
dmix 13y ago
This pseudo-libertarian confusion is largely due to the neoliberalist movement >1970s, where the government touted laissez-faire markets as the ultimate goal - with the caveat it needs a little bit of state intervention to protect all of us from the downsides of capitalism. This was implemented quite effectively and was largely based on legitimate economics. But it has a giant flaw in implementation: the state intervention part over time becomes a tool for those with power and not for the entire representative population, from where it draws power to intervene. For example, take economic stimulation during recessions, which are often the only time direct economic corrections happens for the average person. The goal is to increase "consumer spending" during downward market trends. Meaning the continued purchase of things they don't really need (new cars, houses, and bank loans). Revenue keeps flowing to the large organizations who would often be hit the hardest during recessions. Plus a few special organizations get direct bailouts from a central bank. We're told in the long run this is better than a complete recession/depression and we'll recover faster. If we just hold on and keep spending, things will get back to normal and everyone in the economy benefits. But if you look at it from a higher-level, the top-end of the market is easily the biggest beneficiary of this policy, while consumers are largely still left with very little ability for upward mobility. The same trend exists in almost all state interventions. Those who come out on top as the result of the policy are almost always those already at the top. It is neither the invisible-hand of free markets nor equal-distribution of state power at work.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
Actually this was the one statement that was correct in the entire article. I don't deny that the government plays an important role in funding science and tech, which in turn is essential for silicon valley. But it is still completely wrong to characterize Silicon Valley as "state-sponsored investment". Take Google. The original algorithm was developed at Stanford, but it didn't involve any fancy math that required a DARPA grant. The founders came up with the idea of using commodity hardware for servers. All the other technologies they later built (MapReduce, BigTable, etc.) were the company's own inventions, involving no help from outside sources. Similar things can be said for Apple, Microsoft and also much of the Open Source movement. The fact that the government played some role does not mean all the value generated really belongs to the government. And in case anyone was tempted to make some false assumptions about my viewpoint, I'm not arguing that there should be no redistribution of wealth. I'm just arguing that claiming that we don't live in a market economy is wrong, and a poor basis for arguing for redistribution of wealth.
- hrkristian 13y ago
  Your parent made the point that without the government Google and others may not have launched in the first place. This modern world has already invented the cheesegrater, what remains to be invented really is -for most part- too complex to be conceived from thin air with a stroke of inspiration. I would have to study for a decade to have a chance at success in quantum physics, and I'd be relying on an enormous amount of gathered knowledge in doing so, much of it coming from state-sponsored work. That would be a tremendous effort on my part, but it pales to the effort of the society as a whole in making my future available to me. In such a light I have a hard time seeing how wealth distribution currently is "fair".
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
    I think silicon valley is much closer to the cheesegrater than to quantum physics. Just because the industry is characterized as high tech, doesn't mean that the actual content requires a huge amount of scientific or mathematical knowledge. As a philosophical point, I agree that the fact that all of society is needed in order to produce our wealth, is a good argument for redistribution. But imagine that somehow this wasn't the case. I think the redistribution would still be justified on the grounds that the imposition on people's rights (paying taxes) is very small compared with the benefits. In fact, forcing people paying taxes is the least restrictive way for the government to implement any policy.
praptak 13y ago
"So you -- whoever you may be -- you have to learn responsibility, and be subjected to market discipline, it's good for your character, it's tough love, and so on, and so forth. But me, I need the nanny State, to protect me from market discipline, so that I'll be able to rant and rave about the marvels of the free market, while I'm getting properly subsidized and defended by everyone else, through the nanny State. And also, this has to be risk-free. So I'm perfectly willing to make profits, but I don't want to take risks. If anything goes wrong, you bail me out." Noam Chomsky, "Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World": http://www.chomsky.info/talks/19960413.htm http://www.chomsky.info/talks/19960413.htm
possibilistic 13y ago
> The rich and powerful are fully in favor of a strong, powerful state-run economy that serves their needs. That's why it's done under the rubric of military spending -- "we have to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on this because we have to defend ourselves" sounds better than "because we need it to produce the Silicon Valley economic miracle." Why don't we go back to funding moonshot projects instead, then? Let's see Apollo Program/Human Genome Project-level spending on Next-generation sequencing (protein and RNA included), novel propulsion engines for deep space probes, battery research, materials, etc. If we spent the same money on pressing problems, we could support the science and tech sectors all the while doing incredible societal good.
michaelochurch 13y ago
Instead, the state-supported rich and powerful can claim we live in a "free market economy" that just happens to have trillions of state-sponsored investment, for them. Corporatism (the current system) is neither socialism nor capitalism. It's designed to give a well-connected elite the best of both systems and the rest of society the worst of both. It's like suburbia, which delivers the best of both worlds (urban and rural) for the rich and the worst of both to the poor. The truth is that the elite of our society do not meaningfully compete. They serve on each others' corporate boards, arrange jobs for one another in event of adverse circumstances, and have generally set up their own private welfare system (see: EIR gigs). The competition rhetoric exists because they intend for us to compete-- against each other, thus ignoring them.

by abalone 13y ago

jerf 13y ago

The 2012 US GDP was 15.68 trillion. The 2012 Federal government expenditures were 3.54 trillion. Right off the top, the Federal government accounts for 22.6% of the economic activity in the country. Depending on how you measure, you can quibble with this exact choice of numbers, but no matter how you fiddle you're not getting out of the Federal government being a huge part of the economy directly. State and local governments still not counted in that number. The Federal government also controls the Federal interest rate and its centralized currency directly. It extensively regulates every major financial industry; to the extent that this fails to produce sufficient "regulation" for a liberal's purposes, it is, generally speaking, not for lack of statutory power, and a concerned liberal should probably be looking at the (almost always) liberals exercising the statutory power, rather than complaining about the few people whose meager voices suggest that perhaps the power shouldn't exist at all, lost in the sea of those screaming for more. Indeed, it extensively regulates every major industry. It produces thousands of pages of new regulations every year. It taxes nearly every economic transaction. You can't hardly do anything without the government being involved. It already engages in huge wealth transfers every which way (even some really crazy stupid ones, like Obamacare's transfers from the young and healthy to the on-average wealthier older crowd). This is not necessarily and automatically a bad thing. I'm just mentioning this stuff to show that the idea that we live in some sort of libertarian nightmare is ludicrous nonsense. The state has the power already, today. It's not theoretical, it's a done deal. If you don't like the outcome we're experiencing, take it up with the State. Personally I can't help but observe that we keep giving more power to fewer people under the rubric of "better government", and, lo and behold, our society has ever more power and wealth concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. Why, oh why ever could it be? Somehow some people manage to convince themselves this is all the libertarian's fault. I'd suggest looking at the people who keep putting more and more power in fewer and fewer people's hands and then acting all confused about the outcome where more power ends up in fewer people's hands. There might be a connection there. We might want to consider, you know, not doing that more if we don't like the outcome we're getting. Much of the reason why I am a libertarian is that I actually think it's a good thing for society, in precisely the ways that David Simon is complaining about. With the bloated Federal government taking all the power, the government not only doesn't solve "the problem", for whatever problem we're talking about, but it also often prevents you from solving the problem. It can do this either legally, where it claims for itself exclusively the power to solve the problem, followed by it either doing nothing or doing the wrong thing, or perhaps more poisonously, it convinces you that it is its responsibility to solve the problem, followed again by not doing so or doing the wrong thing. A couple of days ago I happened to flip by the Canadian Broadcasting Channel's news hour, and there was this guy standing in front of a children's playground, complaining that the city wasn't taking care of it. Scattered on the playground were about 30-40 bagged piles of doggy-doo-doo. It otherwise appeared to be a fine playground; it was modern, the paint was cared for, the swings were all there, it did not show obvious wear. He's standing there talking to the reporter and complaining that their part of the city needs more money. My crazy, socially-evil, society-hating, collective-despising libertarian anwser was "Dude, in the amount of time you spent complaining to the reporter, you could have just cleaned up the playground." Seriously, all that was wrong with it appeared to be scattered piles of, and again I emphasize, bagged doggie-doo. This is how the government can corrode away the very social consciousness that people so desparately try to use governments to create. Yeah, it's a small example, but it happens everywhere, for all kinds of things. (Yes, I realize that cleaning it would then mean the guy couldn't complain, so he's putting on a show. I further realize that it's really quite likely that the doggie-doo receptable probably had all the doggie doo piled up in an somewhat unsanitary pile, and the guy probably deliberately scattered it before the video shoot, because really, scattered bagged doggie poo is a rather unlikely scenario. However, I'd suggest this just further emphasizes the point I was trying to make here. You can't create "social responsibility" by telling everyone that somebody in $GOVERNMENT is going to take care of "it". You create the exact opposite. If you want more social responsibility you need less government.)

jjoonathan 13y ago
It's an often repeated libertarian mantra that the 22.6% of the US economy under state control is responsible for ~100% of the inequity. Unfortunately, the network effect ensures that a "government node" in the economic graph is always nearby, and the coplexity inherent in the system makes it easy to form a plausible argument assigning blame to any node within distance 2 or 3 of a problem, making the mantra non-falsifiable. It deserves mention that this game can be played in reverse just as easily. The only way that I know to introduce an ounce of objectivity into the discussion is to pick a single topic and dive so deeply into it that you are no longer fooled by the false but plausible statements hurled around by either side. Unfortunately, this is a very difficult task. I don't know how to scale the approach.
- dnautics 13y ago
  22.6% of the US economy under state control is responsible for ~100% of the inequity. Inflation has a compounding effect of screwing the poor and transferring that wealth to the rich. It shouldn't be surprising that in 1970 Nixon unpegged the dollar and let inflation float and since 1973 the income inequality in this country has gradually become unhinged. we keep giving more power to fewer people under the rubric of "better government", and, lo and behold, our society has ever more power and wealth concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. Why, oh why ever could it be. Rich and wealthy liberal economists keep prescribing more government(which they may or may not realize contributed to their cupidity) to 'help out the poor' with 'stimulus' (which gets subcontracted to politically connected, wealthy people - did we not just throw 650 millon dollars at already-rich people to build a broken healthcare website?), while stabbing them in the back with inflation
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - hbags 13y ago
    Inflation is most damaging to those who save but do not invest. The poor are near 100% consumption, so it has essentially no effect on them. A person whose average cash balance is $100 is not vulnerable to inflation.

seoguru 13y ago

Very well put. Mariana Mazzucato talks about this idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1IPsldbBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1IPsldbBg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPvG_fGPvQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPvG_fGPvQo

dnautics 13y ago
that is a crazy video. You can either take her thesis at her word, or you can read between the lines and realize that this is an incredible outline of how government transfers wealth to the already wealthy. Her suggestion is that the reason why the US is such a dynamic economic system is because the government underwrites it; but this is a flawed concept. In the era 1860-1920 the US government did not underwrite very much scientific or technology or provide SBIRs or any such thing, and you would be hard pressed to argue that the US did not undergo major economic improvement.
- mooreds 13y ago
  Re 1860-1920, have you heard of the railroad land grants? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts These were tremendous gifts to private companies to induce investment in what was one of the high tech industries of the time.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    true. However, there were fabulously successful railroads (e.g. great northern) which were entirely privately funded, even down to securing property easements (which these days would be done using eminent domain). IIRC the great northern was really one of the few railway that didn't suffer a downturn and shutter itself during that era... It's now a part of BNSF.
    - scarmig 13y ago
      It seems remiss to talk about how the Great Northern didn't need any government help when it bought all its land from the federal government after the federal government had acquired control of it by slaughtering most of the land's previous residents.

dmix 13y ago

This pseudo-libertarian confusion is largely due to the neoliberalist movement >1970s, where the government touted laissez-faire markets as the ultimate goal - with the caveat it needs a little bit of state intervention to protect all of us from the downsides of capitalism. This was implemented quite effectively and was largely based on legitimate economics. But it has a giant flaw in implementation: the state intervention part over time becomes a tool for those with power and not for the entire representative population, from where it draws power to intervene. For example, take economic stimulation during recessions, which are often the only time direct economic corrections happens for the average person. The goal is to increase "consumer spending" during downward market trends. Meaning the continued purchase of things they don't really need (new cars, houses, and bank loans). Revenue keeps flowing to the large organizations who would often be hit the hardest during recessions. Plus a few special organizations get direct bailouts from a central bank. We're told in the long run this is better than a complete recession/depression and we'll recover faster. If we just hold on and keep spending, things will get back to normal and everyone in the economy benefits. But if you look at it from a higher-level, the top-end of the market is easily the biggest beneficiary of this policy, while consumers are largely still left with very little ability for upward mobility. The same trend exists in almost all state interventions. Those who come out on top as the result of the policy are almost always those already at the top. It is neither the invisible-hand of free markets nor equal-distribution of state power at work.

yetanotherphd 13y ago

Actually this was the one statement that was correct in the entire article. I don't deny that the government plays an important role in funding science and tech, which in turn is essential for silicon valley. But it is still completely wrong to characterize Silicon Valley as "state-sponsored investment". Take Google. The original algorithm was developed at Stanford, but it didn't involve any fancy math that required a DARPA grant. The founders came up with the idea of using commodity hardware for servers. All the other technologies they later built (MapReduce, BigTable, etc.) were the company's own inventions, involving no help from outside sources. Similar things can be said for Apple, Microsoft and also much of the Open Source movement. The fact that the government played some role does not mean all the value generated really belongs to the government. And in case anyone was tempted to make some false assumptions about my viewpoint, I'm not arguing that there should be no redistribution of wealth. I'm just arguing that claiming that we don't live in a market economy is wrong, and a poor basis for arguing for redistribution of wealth.

hrkristian 13y ago
Your parent made the point that without the government Google and others may not have launched in the first place. This modern world has already invented the cheesegrater, what remains to be invented really is -for most part- too complex to be conceived from thin air with a stroke of inspiration. I would have to study for a decade to have a chance at success in quantum physics, and I'd be relying on an enormous amount of gathered knowledge in doing so, much of it coming from state-sponsored work. That would be a tremendous effort on my part, but it pales to the effort of the society as a whole in making my future available to me. In such a light I have a hard time seeing how wealth distribution currently is "fair".
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  I think silicon valley is much closer to the cheesegrater than to quantum physics. Just because the industry is characterized as high tech, doesn't mean that the actual content requires a huge amount of scientific or mathematical knowledge. As a philosophical point, I agree that the fact that all of society is needed in order to produce our wealth, is a good argument for redistribution. But imagine that somehow this wasn't the case. I think the redistribution would still be justified on the grounds that the imposition on people's rights (paying taxes) is very small compared with the benefits. In fact, forcing people paying taxes is the least restrictive way for the government to implement any policy.

praptak 13y ago

"So you -- whoever you may be -- you have to learn responsibility, and be subjected to market discipline, it's good for your character, it's tough love, and so on, and so forth. But me, I need the nanny State, to protect me from market discipline, so that I'll be able to rant and rave about the marvels of the free market, while I'm getting properly subsidized and defended by everyone else, through the nanny State. And also, this has to be risk-free. So I'm perfectly willing to make profits, but I don't want to take risks. If anything goes wrong, you bail me out." Noam Chomsky, "Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World": http://www.chomsky.info/talks/19960413.htm http://www.chomsky.info/talks/19960413.htm

possibilistic 13y ago

> The rich and powerful are fully in favor of a strong, powerful state-run economy that serves their needs. That's why it's done under the rubric of military spending -- "we have to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on this because we have to defend ourselves" sounds better than "because we need it to produce the Silicon Valley economic miracle." Why don't we go back to funding moonshot projects instead, then? Let's see Apollo Program/Human Genome Project-level spending on Next-generation sequencing (protein and RNA included), novel propulsion engines for deep space probes, battery research, materials, etc. If we spent the same money on pressing problems, we could support the science and tech sectors all the while doing incredible societal good.

michaelochurch 13y ago

Instead, the state-supported rich and powerful can claim we live in a "free market economy" that just happens to have trillions of state-sponsored investment, for them. Corporatism (the current system) is neither socialism nor capitalism. It's designed to give a well-connected elite the best of both systems and the rest of society the worst of both. It's like suburbia, which delivers the best of both worlds (urban and rural) for the rich and the worst of both to the poor. The truth is that the elite of our society do not meaningfully compete. They serve on each others' corporate boards, arrange jobs for one another in event of adverse circumstances, and have generally set up their own private welfare system (see: EIR gigs). The competition rhetoric exists because they intend for us to compete-- against each other, thus ignoring them.