Regardless of your party affiliation or nationality, corporate consolidation and labor suppression affects us all. Though the essay emphasizes changes over time in U.S. antitrust enforcement,...
Regardless of your party affiliation or nationality, corporate consolidation and labor suppression affects us all.
Though the essay emphasizes changes over time in U.S. antitrust enforcement, there's a clear global trend towards regulatory capture, dilution of labor bargaining powers, and corruption of legislative enforcement mechanisms for restraint.
This is what snapped me out of being a libertarian. The free market does indeed have flaws. Monopolistic and Oligopolistic business practices are the natural 'end state' the market produces in any...
This is what snapped me out of being a libertarian. The free market does indeed have flaws. Monopolistic and Oligopolistic business practices are the natural 'end state' the market produces in any given industry. Go ahead, name me any mature (as in, has been around a while) market segments that haven't undergone this kind of consolidation.
Capitalism is so amazing when something new begins. Hundreds of startups all competing, a deluge of new ideas and opportunities. It's a whirlwind of chaos and progress moves so fast it's difficult to follow. This is the image of the 'market' I think most people have in their heads when they talk about how fantastic capitalism is.
The problem is, that's just the initial phase. Not long after, the inevitable consolidation begins, and merger after merger, that vibrant marketplace full of so many choices starts to turn into something very different. Given enough time, all of the businesses devour each other like vultures feasting on the carcasses of the dead until there are only a few obese abominations left in the field.
Inevitably, those monsters now turn around and start turning their market capture into wealth, happy to exploit customers who now no longer have easy alternatives available. They take that wealth and use it to buy themselves favorable treatment from governments and other businesses. At this level a very different game is being played, a game where only real money buys access.
Now, the market will eventually correct for this too, when a new technology disrupts an old playing field - but that correction can take decades while a lot of damage is being done. These monsters also have so much wealth at their disposal that they can throw up massive barriers in the market and meddle with laws and regulations to place the new paradigm at a disadvantage. That paradigm will still win in the end, but again, this slows it down and draws out the process, stalling progress.
I see some aspects of socialism and regulation as necessary to try and ablate the damage.
I find it really frustrating how 'regulation' has become synonymous with unnecessary inefficiency and government overreach for a lot of people. I think we can all agree that regulations could be...
I see some aspects of socialism and regulation as necessary to try and ablate the damage.
I find it really frustrating how 'regulation' has become synonymous with unnecessary inefficiency and government overreach for a lot of people. I think we can all agree that regulations could be those things, but that doesn't mean that all regulation is a priori harmful. Unless your only consideration is your bottom line, of course.
Making sure that foodstuffs are safe to eat or that organ donations weren't unwillingly harvested by human traffickers, for example, would require regulation that shouldn't really impact the running of properly-run (read:ethical) business. Nonetheless, people cry 'zomg red tape' every time a reasonable protection is even hinted at and 50% of the population eats it right up.
I get frustrated because people treat socialism and capitalism as a false dichotomy. For a lot of people, it's either-or, you can't have both at the same time - which is of course patently...
I get frustrated because people treat socialism and capitalism as a false dichotomy. For a lot of people, it's either-or, you can't have both at the same time - which is of course patently ridiculous. Having both at the same time is likely to help improve both systems.
Nothing can even begin to touch capitalism's power in building markets. We simply can't do without - the market sets prices. That's why a full socialist or communist system won't survive in the long run. Business A is turning widgets into gadgets and Business B is turning gadgets back into widgets, and without a market, you can't set a price on widgets and gadgets to know which you ought to be doing.
So let the market handle almost everything. Almost.
I love the idea of UBI (in the USA it'd be a negative income tax) combined with universal health care and free education. The UBI would prevent people from crashing through the bottom of the market into destitution. The health care keeps them alive and capable of working. The education makes sure they can learn any skills and trades the market needs. Plus, I think we can agree that health and education are more important than any greed-driven 'profit motive' from an ethical standpoint. They are investments that will yield large returns over time. UBI also provides people with peace of mind and the ability to take risks on new ventures without becoming bankrupt paupers if they fail.
That helps the bottom. What to do at the top of the tree though is a lot more prickly. Something has to block or regulate that out of control system. Ideally we'd find some way to preserve all of those competitive elements that make capitalism so great before the consolidation phase gets out of control. We want some consolidation, but not oligopolies.
I had an idea a while back regarding the advantages of markets versus centrally-planned economies. The advantage is in the allocation of computational resources. A centrally planned economy could...
Nothing can even begin to touch capitalism's power in building markets. We simply can't do without - the market sets prices. That's why a full socialist or communist system won't survive in the long run. Business A is turning widgets into gadgets and Business B is turning gadgets back into widgets, and without a market, you can't set a price on widgets and gadgets to know which you ought to be doing.
I had an idea a while back regarding the advantages of markets versus centrally-planned economies. The advantage is in the allocation of computational resources. A centrally planned economy could work if you built a model that accurately captured the needs and production capacities of all agents in the system (this is a monumental task). This model would be impossibly complex to implement on modern hardware and its inputs would require a substantial and intrusive surveillance mechanism. If you set out to build this system, a natural improvement would be to develop a distributed computational model. This model would focus only on the local interactions of the agents in this system, allow them to be computed independently and therefore in parallel; to dictate how their labor is applied based on their own local knowledge. In this way, the centrally planned economy scales with the number of people. The next improvement would be to recognize that many of the local optimization problems that these agents would be faced with would be best handled by some sort of data-driven learning algorithm - like some sophisticated manifestation of an artificial neural network that has perfect knowledge of the state as perceived by the agent that it is meant to model. There is a lot of hand-waving in this but if you follow this line of thinking, a free market is essentially a centrally planned economy that uses a distributed computational model where the computational resources are embedded in the system. A crowd-sourced model of a centrally planned economy. It's sort of a ridiculous reduction but bear with it.
In this way, free markets manage to allocate the monumental computational resource that is the collective brains of its agents whereas any imaginable or attempted centrally planned economy would neglect that resource. Where this falls apart, aside from the moral problems, is that capital flows between agents and their ability to accrue capital increases with their possession of it. This is an unstable system - it evolves inevitably towards a singular state. One approach to stabilize it would be to periodically normalize the distribution of capital. A more sophisticated, less intrusive mechanism would involve dictating how capital can flow while still leaving plenty of freedom for each agent's attempt at localized optimization.
In short, the inevitable course of unregulated markets is unbounded concentration of wealth and a misallocation of the computational resources that make the free market advantageous.
My go to example of this is weights and measures. Prior to weights and measures standardization and legislation you had stuff like land owners taxing peasants in X baskets of wheat a year (with...
My go to example of this is weights and measures.
Prior to weights and measures standardization and legislation you had stuff like land owners taxing peasants in X baskets of wheat a year (with the baskets growing each year).
Since the history is well documented & the hassle of carrying your own pint glass & weights is obvious people seem to get it more easily.
Regardless of your party affiliation or nationality, corporate consolidation and labor suppression affects us all.
Though the essay emphasizes changes over time in U.S. antitrust enforcement, there's a clear global trend towards regulatory capture, dilution of labor bargaining powers, and corruption of legislative enforcement mechanisms for restraint.
This is what snapped me out of being a libertarian. The free market does indeed have flaws. Monopolistic and Oligopolistic business practices are the natural 'end state' the market produces in any given industry. Go ahead, name me any mature (as in, has been around a while) market segments that haven't undergone this kind of consolidation.
Capitalism is so amazing when something new begins. Hundreds of startups all competing, a deluge of new ideas and opportunities. It's a whirlwind of chaos and progress moves so fast it's difficult to follow. This is the image of the 'market' I think most people have in their heads when they talk about how fantastic capitalism is.
The problem is, that's just the initial phase. Not long after, the inevitable consolidation begins, and merger after merger, that vibrant marketplace full of so many choices starts to turn into something very different. Given enough time, all of the businesses devour each other like vultures feasting on the carcasses of the dead until there are only a few obese abominations left in the field.
Inevitably, those monsters now turn around and start turning their market capture into wealth, happy to exploit customers who now no longer have easy alternatives available. They take that wealth and use it to buy themselves favorable treatment from governments and other businesses. At this level a very different game is being played, a game where only real money buys access.
Now, the market will eventually correct for this too, when a new technology disrupts an old playing field - but that correction can take decades while a lot of damage is being done. These monsters also have so much wealth at their disposal that they can throw up massive barriers in the market and meddle with laws and regulations to place the new paradigm at a disadvantage. That paradigm will still win in the end, but again, this slows it down and draws out the process, stalling progress.
I see some aspects of socialism and regulation as necessary to try and ablate the damage.
I find it really frustrating how 'regulation' has become synonymous with unnecessary inefficiency and government overreach for a lot of people. I think we can all agree that regulations could be those things, but that doesn't mean that all regulation is a priori harmful. Unless your only consideration is your bottom line, of course.
Making sure that foodstuffs are safe to eat or that organ donations weren't unwillingly harvested by human traffickers, for example, would require regulation that shouldn't really impact the running of properly-run (read:ethical) business. Nonetheless, people cry 'zomg red tape' every time a reasonable protection is even hinted at and 50% of the population eats it right up.
I get frustrated because people treat socialism and capitalism as a false dichotomy. For a lot of people, it's either-or, you can't have both at the same time - which is of course patently ridiculous. Having both at the same time is likely to help improve both systems.
Nothing can even begin to touch capitalism's power in building markets. We simply can't do without - the market sets prices. That's why a full socialist or communist system won't survive in the long run. Business A is turning widgets into gadgets and Business B is turning gadgets back into widgets, and without a market, you can't set a price on widgets and gadgets to know which you ought to be doing.
So let the market handle almost everything. Almost.
I love the idea of UBI (in the USA it'd be a negative income tax) combined with universal health care and free education. The UBI would prevent people from crashing through the bottom of the market into destitution. The health care keeps them alive and capable of working. The education makes sure they can learn any skills and trades the market needs. Plus, I think we can agree that health and education are more important than any greed-driven 'profit motive' from an ethical standpoint. They are investments that will yield large returns over time. UBI also provides people with peace of mind and the ability to take risks on new ventures without becoming bankrupt paupers if they fail.
That helps the bottom. What to do at the top of the tree though is a lot more prickly. Something has to block or regulate that out of control system. Ideally we'd find some way to preserve all of those competitive elements that make capitalism so great before the consolidation phase gets out of control. We want some consolidation, but not oligopolies.
I had an idea a while back regarding the advantages of markets versus centrally-planned economies. The advantage is in the allocation of computational resources. A centrally planned economy could work if you built a model that accurately captured the needs and production capacities of all agents in the system (this is a monumental task). This model would be impossibly complex to implement on modern hardware and its inputs would require a substantial and intrusive surveillance mechanism. If you set out to build this system, a natural improvement would be to develop a distributed computational model. This model would focus only on the local interactions of the agents in this system, allow them to be computed independently and therefore in parallel; to dictate how their labor is applied based on their own local knowledge. In this way, the centrally planned economy scales with the number of people. The next improvement would be to recognize that many of the local optimization problems that these agents would be faced with would be best handled by some sort of data-driven learning algorithm - like some sophisticated manifestation of an artificial neural network that has perfect knowledge of the state as perceived by the agent that it is meant to model. There is a lot of hand-waving in this but if you follow this line of thinking, a free market is essentially a centrally planned economy that uses a distributed computational model where the computational resources are embedded in the system. A crowd-sourced model of a centrally planned economy. It's sort of a ridiculous reduction but bear with it.
In this way, free markets manage to allocate the monumental computational resource that is the collective brains of its agents whereas any imaginable or attempted centrally planned economy would neglect that resource. Where this falls apart, aside from the moral problems, is that capital flows between agents and their ability to accrue capital increases with their possession of it. This is an unstable system - it evolves inevitably towards a singular state. One approach to stabilize it would be to periodically normalize the distribution of capital. A more sophisticated, less intrusive mechanism would involve dictating how capital can flow while still leaving plenty of freedom for each agent's attempt at localized optimization.
In short, the inevitable course of unregulated markets is unbounded concentration of wealth and a misallocation of the computational resources that make the free market advantageous.
My go to example of this is weights and measures.
Prior to weights and measures standardization and legislation you had stuff like land owners taxing peasants in X baskets of wheat a year (with the baskets growing each year).
Since the history is well documented & the hassle of carrying your own pint glass & weights is obvious people seem to get it more easily.