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Capitalists Who Fear Change
bill_mcgonigle writes "In his essay 'Capitalists Who Fear Change,' author Jeffrey Tucker takes on 'wimps who don't want to improve.' From DMCA take-downs on 3D printing files to the constant refrain that every new form of music recording will 'kill music,' Mr. Tucker observes, 'Through our long history of improvement, every upgrade and every shift from old to new inspired panic. The biggest panic typically comes from the producers themselves who resent the way the market process destabilizes their business model.' He analyzes how the markets move the march of technology ever forward. He takes on patents, copyrights, tariffs, and protectionism of entrenched interests in general, with guarded optimism: 'The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who lack the imagination to see the potential here don't get their way.'"
Home farming is killing the hunting and gathering industries.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Once the average home can contain everything needed to produce consumer items, there will be no more reason for big business.
Imagine a set of 3d printers, automated chemical labs, vapor-deposited chip fab in your garage. Maybe even a programmable genetic engineering machine and a computer controlled hydroponic garden to produce your food. You'd never go to the store again.
Can you imagine where we would be now if companies like the RIAA, AT&T, Time Warner and other big media/telecom firms had fully realized what the Internet would turn out to be like 20 years ago? I shudder to imagine what they would have made it instead of what it is now. I'm so grateful for their lack of imagination.
If I can continue to make lots of money by protecting the entrenched system, then the appropriate response is to put the brakes on change.
That's the socialist way; 'we won't allow you to sell a car because it will put the buggy-whip workers out of a job'.
In a free market, there will be a bazillion people trying to create new products that compete with yours, and some will be successful. 'Patents, copyrights, tariffs, and protectionism' are all government-created restrictions on trade, and would not exist in a free market.
No, a handful of high level suggestions would be useful. I rarely even get that. Though I am not surprised to get an offhand dismissal from an AC. That said, when people scream about "reducing regulation" it rarely has anything to do with bills that benefit corporations.
And I expect better from /. as well, which is why I'm baffled that the GGP got modded +4 with such an empty post.
Unsubstantiated vagaries. I wanted one example, can you not even provide that? If you are so concerned, obviously you have specific examples you have selected as evidence for your case.
Such as? Let's go at this another way, name a company that has been shut down or kept out of a market because of regulations?
It does matter. Suggesting that you can just arbitrarily drop half the regulations in existence implies that no one rule has any more value than another, which is totally disingenuous.
A more accurate definition of capitalism consists of two basic things:
- right to private property
- free market
The entire capitalist system is defined by these two aspects alone. If a state grants every citizen the right to own stuff, and also buy and sell to whoever they see fit not only their stuff but also the stuff they make and the services they provide then we have a capitalist system.
Some implementations of a capitalist system may have some limits and restrictions (i.e., only a selected few can sell services as medical doctors, including prescribe drugs) but these two aspects, right to private property and a free market, are the basis of capitalism.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Hidden behind the scenes of this discussions is the inherent and unquestioned assumption that capitalism is good.
Note that I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying that there is an entrenched belief here even stronger than religion. The arguments all seem to be "whose definition of capitalism" and "One True Scotsman" type of arguments. But under it all is the (again) unquestioned assumption that capitalism (appropriately defined, of course) is the One True Way of resource management.
Again, in this I'm not questioning capitalism, I'm questioning the degree to which it has become a base assumption.
So here's a bit of a progression...
1 - Democracy and elections are good - not because they generate the best government, but because when properly executed, they peacefully remove and replace the government. Sometimes the replacement is better, sometimes worse, but at the very least, the replacement process is less disruptive and wasteful than a bloody revolution. If democracy were really working well, principally if the electorate chose to educate themselves well, governance would get incrementally better, where "better" is defined by a majority of the people. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
2 - Capitalism is good - not because it does the best job of distributing resources, but because when properly executed, bad players in the system exit and others take their place. If the market were properly transparent, and properly policed, even if only by its participants, the job of distributing resources would get incrementally better. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
There is nothing sacrosanct about the "profit motive". It's a nod to human nature, recognizing that personal gain can be highly motivating. Other than that motivational factor, "profit" is simply inefficiency in moving goods from supplier to consumer. The real idea behind the "free market" is that it harnesses chaos - a sort of natural selection of a wide array of ideas. When incumbants are able to suppress emergents, the free market is failing.
It's amusing/astonishing/sad that people rail at the thought of economic central planning by a government, yet accept economic central planning by entrenched market incumbants. It's not the government that's the enemy, it's the central planning, by whatever party. Some amount of chaos must exist, some continual level of instability, or the system isn't really working.
Food for thought...
In a world with nuclear bombs, genetically engineered virii, and other results of high technology becoming widely available, "human nature" is no longer good enough. If we don't start doing better than "human nature", we'll probably stop doing. Thinking about it a little, we're more likely to crash our society, crash our population, lose our technology, and be lucky to work our way back to a feudal steam age. (The easy energy is gone. The easy resources are gone, perhaps accessible in landfills, perhaps locked up in alloys that need high energy and high-tech to get out.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
you're a moron
you believe the only choices are the extremes?
how about capitalism with social safety nets?
how about socialism with a capitalist engine?
moderation, the middle way, is true wisdom
but don't let that stop you from painting me as another extreme just because i stand against your extreme
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Communism works fine. Hutterite colonies all around here operate on communal ownership and have for decades.
What communism does not do is scale up worth a damn. Seemingly, once the population goes past Dunbar's number, it breaks down. A non-homogenous population probably would knock that limit down further.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time